CHAPTER II
Among highly recommended "best rooms" in Berlin belonging to apartments which had known much-boasted "better days," and now were let for thirty marks a week, including breakfast and attendance, to respectable young gentlewomen, were those of the widow, Klothilde Laue.
The furniture was upholstered in crimson plush, which had been the latest thing in decorations at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. There was a long mirror, the sides of which from top to bottom were fantastically plastered with new years' and birthday cards, and advertisements of soaps and powders. On the walls hung photographs of once famous actors, whose fame had meanwhile faded like the ink in which they had inscribed their autographs. The marble-topped washstand had an embroidered splasher bearing the following cryptic couplet:
"If you would wash yourself clean,
Take care that your conscience is pure."
There were also endless photograph-albums, card-cases, a sandal-wood windmill meant to clip cigars, a green frosted glass punch-bowl, and a rickety pitch-pine bedstead, behind blue woollen curtains. Finally, to crown all, there hung over the sofa in a gilded glass case a mysterious globular-shaped creation, consisting of six plaited strands of tissue paper radiating from a common centre, and through its covering of gauze an ornamentation of pressed flowers was dimly discernible.
In this best room of 10, Neanderstrasse, situated up four flights of stairs above a china shop, a piano business on the hire system, and a studio for repairs, Lilly landed one day, to look out from the window on the greenish-grey waters of the Engelbecken and a strip of Berlin's smoky sky.
Frau Laue, an overworked, prematurely aged woman of fifty, with a face like a dried apple and great eyes that always looked tearful, revolved round her in incredulous admiration. She seemed unable to grasp that so much brilliance and beauty had positively strayed into her abode.
On the day of her arrival Lilly heard her whole history. Her husband had been cashier and book-keeper at one of the most popular variety theatres in Berlin, but twenty years ago he had died, leaving her pensionless in an unfeeling world where no rosy stage glamour disguises solitary tears, and no comic patter stills the pangs of hunger.
At this juncture that mysterious paper-creation, which on nearer inspection proved to be a lamp-shade, became her salvation. She had once been made a present of it by an artistic friend, and in her need she hit on the happy idea of making others after the same pattern and offering them for sale.
After years of hawking her wares about, after drudgery and disillusionment of all kinds, she had wrung from the public a market for "pressed flower lamp-shades," and a reputation as a specialist in this line of business.
In her back parlour, with one window, which smelt of hay and paste, and where on a long white deal table lay in their hundreds and thousands the skeletons of floral denizens of the Thuringian Forest--she could not, of course, afford the time to gather them herself--she had drudged for nearly two decades, tapping, daubing, pasting, drying, and threading sixteen hours a day, and had earned, thanks to her reputation as a specialist, enough to enable her to let her best room--her treasure-trove and sanctuary--to a stranger for thirty marks a month.
The two did not long remain strangers, however.
Into the back-room existence of this downtrodden being, before whose eyes the pictures of a few bedizened ballet-girls shone and glittered as paragons of unattainable magnificence, Lilly descended from the real aristocracy like a heaven-born divinity. Her landlady idolised her as an emissary from regions that she had believed hitherto were only possible in fiction; where such expressions as "footman," "drawing-room," "pearl necklace"--Lilly took care to tell all about hers--came quite naturally instead of being rolled on the tongue and allowed slowly to melt as with closed eyes one conjured up the surroundings to which such a vocabulary belonged.
Frau Laue became in very early days Lilly's confidante and adviser. She helped her to live down the shame following her divorce, she cheered her when a feeling of desolation overcame her, and painted for her a future in radiant colours.
No one need perish in a great powerful miracle-working city like Berlin. Every day there were dozens of happy chances that might set you on your legs again. There were lonely old ladies dying to find someone to whom they could leave their money; there were aristocratic young ones who yearned to hold out a hand of sympathy and friendship to a poor, beautiful orphaned sister; there were famous artists who would gladly escape from the snares laid for them by female admirers in the arms of a good woman; and there were great poets with whom the post of muse was vacant. In fact, one of the greatest capitals in the world, it would appear, had only been waiting for Lilly's advent to lift her to its throne as conquering heroine.
Again the months passed. Regret for her wasted opportunities became gradually less acute. Her nights were calmer and no longer disturbed by this or that scene from her lost paradise rising before her vision with horrible clearness, when she was in a state between sleeping and waking, to make her start up and cry aloud.
One lesson, however, she had not learnt, and that was to estimate correctly how brief had been her sojourn in high places: she could not accept it as a mere episode that had interrupted the ordinary course of her real life like a capricious dream. In her inner consciousness she continued to be a kind of enchanted princess who, in the disguise of a beggar, went about unknown and unrecognised till such time as Divine dispensation should reinstate her and restore her lawful rights.
With anxious solicitude she clung to everything that reminded her of her vanished splendour. In Frau Lane's wardrobe she hung the festive raiment that the colonel had ordered for her in Dresden, Frau Lane's empty drawers were filled with the snowy fragrance of her coronet-embroidered underclothes, and in front of the big mirror in Frau Lane's best room were ranged the costly ivory and gold toilette articles, which once had proudly graced her dressing-table in the "boudoir." These, too, still bore the seven-pointed coronet, and to think of parting with them would have seemed an outrage to Lilly on her most sacred property. She stood waiting meanwhile for what the future would bring forth. She still studied advertisements and wrote letters applying for vacant situations, but very often forgot to post the letters.
For the sake of having something to do, and craving for companionship of some kind, she began to sit with Frau Laue in the back room and help her with her work. Soon she tapped, cut out, daubed, pasted, and plaited as diligently as her instructress, and as in her cradle she had been endowed with a gift and taste for all things artistic, she speedily excelled Frau Laue, who, when she returned from disposing of the lamp-shades, would relate without envy that the flower pattern Lilly had designed had been singled out for admiration, and that the shades she made were preferred to her own.
Her ambition was aroused. She strove to produce works of art, and never tired of toiling for this end.
"If you didn't waste so much time over every little bunch of flowers," said Frau Laue, who shared honestly with Lilly the proceeds of their joint labours, "you might earn more than I do."
But Lilly was content with the forty or fifty marks a month that her work brought in. Her new craze for lamp-shade making led her on to higher aims. The dried grasses, or grass flowers, as Frau Laue called them, specially took her fancy. Their slender graceful stalks, the delicacy of their veinings, the melancholy charm with which they drooped, reminded her of little forest trees, weeping willows beside brooks, ashes bending over marble tombs, or palms waving yearning fronds on torrid rocks.
She dreamt of starting a new kind of art. She would paint on transparent plaques of glass with dried grass foregrounds. She would paint lamp-shades and window-blinds with woods of flowering grass and ferns, with little cottages in relief, with their doors and windows cut out as if light were shining from inside; fleecy clouds, pink sunsets, lines of misty hills, dark-blue rivers in which the moon was reflected, building across them bridges of light.
The pictures succeeded each other in her brain with inexhaustible fecundity; there seemed no end to them. It was difficult to know where to begin with such a vast wealth of ideas at one's disposal.
Frau Laue, who had been pasting her oil paper in exactly the same way for twenty years, had a horror of innovations, and warned Lilly to stick to her last. But a demon of inventiveness possessed Lilly. One day she made a tremendous coup. She took her arrow-shaped brooch set with six small emeralds to a jeweller, who gave her eighty marks for it--needless to say, the brooch was worth five times as much--and purchased on her way home after the transaction several cut-glass plaques, held together in pairs by screws, so that they could be easily attached to the window-panes. She also invested in a paint-box, and while Frau Laue clasped her hands in dismay to her head, Lilly set to work gallantly. But her practical knowledge of art had no foundation except in the memory of a few water-colour lessons at school, and it failed her utterly. The colours ran into each other, and the woods in the foreground would not look as if they had anything to do with the landscape behind, but remained simply grasses straggling about objectlessly.
For a long time Lilly struggled to gain her effects, then, crying bitterly, she threw the rubbish into a corner, and returned sorrowfully to lamp-shades again.
Frau Laue, who had sulked and scarcely spoken during the weeks of Lilly's apostacy, began once more to make plans and to build castles in the air for her. All the wild schemes that for the last twenty years had taken shape in her poor brain were now, when she had no hope of maturing them for herself, freely poured into Lilly's outstretched palm.
She listened eagerly, yet as her days passed thus a feeling of depression grew--almost imperceptibly. She felt herself sinking into this sordid groove, and a feeling of repulsion took possession of her for the narrow-minded creature in whose great moist red-rimmed eyes still lingered a hope for an unattainable happiness, though her lamp-shade drudgery had brought her nearly to the brink of the grave.
This repulsion was often so powerful that she was compelled to rush out; she didn't care where so long as it was out into the world, into life.
She did not stay long; in an hour or less she was back again. The streets frightened her. The painted women who jostled her, the bold, adventurous youths who followed on her heels, the callous indifference with which everyone elbowed his way through the hurly-burly--all this scared and made a coward of her.
A gloomy foreboding told her that she would never regain her self-reliant joy in combat. When she compared what she was now with the little shopgirl who gave out Frau Asmussen's trashy volumes in sheltered security, confident that she was doing her duty and always in the right, even when beaten for telling lies and obviously in the wrong, she felt she was a helpless straw drifting on the waters.
Then this waiting, waiting; this sleepless, hungry waiting! What for? She did not know herself. But something must happen. She could not exist for ever among these snippets of oiled paper, live and die making lamp-shades. Sometimes the thought of Walter's rich manufacturer of bronze wares cropped up in her mind with a longing which had to be suppressed. She was alarmed to find herself clinging to this shadow, and chased it away.
A year had passed since that letter of introduction was written. It would be far too late to avail herself of it now. So she went on waiting.
Often as she undressed and caught the reflection of herself in the glass, her form consecrated by beauty, round and slender limbed, her long-lashed wistful eyes, her ripe mouth shaped for kisses, she would be seized with glad ecstasy, and say to herself, "Am I like that?" And then she would revel in a sense of her youth and readiness for love. Then the whole world seemed there for no other object than to press her to its heart. Then this dreary round of drudgery was a good thing in disguise, for it was bracing her up for flights of intoxicating enjoyment. When she stretched herself on the sofa at dusk to rest, and she saw the blue flash made by the electric tramcars flit across the ceiling, blissful dreams stole upon her and transformed that burning fever of expectancy into half-fulfilled delights; a feeling of having been saved rose like a thanksgiving in her soul, and what she had been bewailing as lost happiness became nothing but a nightmare from which she was grateful to be relieved. But these moods were rare, and they resembled the mirage of thirsty travellers rather than the refreshing waters.
The winter passed in rain and fog; mild March evenings came when rosy cloudlets floated over the housetops, and then spring was really there. The trim little trees in the squares put forth their brown buds, which by degrees burst into pale green leaves. Lilly saw as little of the riot of blossom out of doors, the white foam of the cherry-trees, the red glory of the hawthorn, as she had done when she swept the golden dust that sprang from Frau Asmussen's bookcases. Frau Laue did not care to take walks and expose herself to temptation. For to see a park and not collect plants, a garden gate, and not thrust your hand through it to pick flowers, was to her an altogether inconceivable act of self-restraint. Lilly would not go out without her, for she dreaded being alone in a crowd.
Warm, oppressive Sunday afternoons followed, when endless troops of townsfolk make pilgrimages to the suburbs and country round, when the streets stretch away in empty desolation, and the sultry skies seem to weigh down suffocatingly on the unfortunate people left at home, panting within four walls. On such afternoons Frau Laue put on a pair of real Rhinestone earrings, a brown velveteen dress with a collar of black sequins on the square-cut neck, and in this festive attire paid Lilly a formal visit in the best room. Then the Dresden evening gowns came out of the wardrobe, and entered into competition with those worn twenty-five years ago by frail ladies in the stage box of the variety theatre. The faded photographs of long-extinguished stars would be brought down from the wall and their charms examined. Apropos of these, thrilling stories would be related of personal adventures, in which, amid much laxity of morals and gay peccadilloes, matrimonial fidelity had maintained its modest value.
The summer Sunday afternoon would wear away, wan and exhausted as a fever patient, a stifling breeze blow in at the window. The varnish on the cheap rosewood furniture would reek, the houses opposite shine as if they were perspiring, and Frau Laue, munching her bread and cheese, would once more repeat the oft-told tale of her virtuous married life.
When at last she took her departure, Lilly would sink groaning on her bed, hide her face in the stuffy pillows, and listen to the shouts of the merry-makers in the street below returning from their trips. The next morning the pressing and pasting of flowers would begin again with renewed vigour.
July came, and she could stand it no longer. One Monday morning, when daylight found her awake and waiting, her pillow soaked with tears, a sudden longing for life so warm and irresistible filled her heart that she bounded out of bed with an exultant cry.
Resolve cried within her, "I'll do it to-day--to-day! Go on a begging expedition to that unknown man." No, it would not be begging. God forbid! Long ago she had settled in her mind what line she would take. She would merely ask for advice such as he, a connoisseur with a wide experience in arts and crafts, would be able to give the inquiring amateur, anxious to learn, in a few minutes.
Where and how she could get good lessons in painting transparencies on glass plaques, was the question she wanted to ask him. And whatever his answer might be, it would be the first step in a new phase of life.