CHAPTER XIV
In human development each spring, as it comes round, has its particular significance and associations. Every spring finds a man different; every one opens old wounds anew, and sounds hidden depths. Sometimes it passes like a stupid unprofitable game, because he himself is feeling stupid and unprofitable; others torment him with a thousand futile admonitions, because he is utterly unable to render account to his own conscience. Sometimes spring finds him barren and clogged, like ground that cannot recover from the ravages of winter. And, again, spring carols deceptive songs of liberation and redemption in a man's heart, as if it was in its power to liberate and redeem. But the most beautiful manifestation of spring is when we are scarcely aware of it, because its budding and sprouting is but symbolic of the jubilant stirring of spring within us, the widening and growth of our being spiritually.
Such a spring now dawned for Lilly. Everything seemed to wear a new face. The early sunshine had never before cut such grotesque little capers on the wall, never had there been such ravishing violet twilights at the end of rainy days, never had people worn such hopeful festive looks as they passed her, never had the din of street traffic sounded so full of an infectious revelling in activity.
Yes, and all at once she too found no end of things to do. Every hour was full of delightful and urgent engagements. If anyone had told her during the last few years that she would ever again, with burning cheeks and a feverish brain, get up dates, quotations, historical allusions, and foreign words, she would have laughed at them.
But now, whatever she did, she must not idle. As that time she had been ready with her answer about Giotto, so she must always have a response on the tip of her tongue when it was expected of her. All her eagerness to learn, which had been quenched in her for years by a feeling of isolation and uselessness, now streamed forth anew. And her mind--like a starved and uncultivated pasture--absorbed everything it was offered with an insatiable maw. It demanded hardly an effort to commit things to memory; she had only to imagine that she was quoting to him, and lines remained with her.
She managed it all with the utmost secrecy, for Konrad--yes, that was his name, Konrad; he was called Konrad--must not suspect that her knowledge was brand-new and fresh from the mint. She sneaked alone to the museums and picture galleries because she wanted him to think she had been at home in them from time immemorial. Then she practised up several pieces of old music that might be of use to him in his work. And often did she bless her father's rigid discipline, which had kept her at the piano till late in the night.
They saw a great deal of each other. He came every other evening as a regular thing. He avoided the afternoons, knowing that they were devoted to the friend of her fiancé, but often in the middle of the day he bounded up the stairs with a book or a flower, and begged for a little music. He never would stay to lunch, however warmly she pressed him. For the most part he was not at his ease in her flat; he would walk up and down restlessly, look at his watch and then hurry off. At first she was hurt, and asked him teasingly if he thought he was in the enemy's country when he came to see her. But, of course, she did not yet thoroughly understand him. Every day revealed some new and unusual trait in his character.
He was still extremely young, not only in years. She had known many callous, blasé old men of twenty-five--which was his age. His youth was within him. His thoughts were young and passionate, and she had never met anyone who expended so much care on mere thinking. His ideas seemed to be to him tangible beings, with whom he had to come to grips and either hug to his heart or spurn with his foot. Friends or enemies to him were all the great thinkers and creators of other times. He associated with them as with masters and comrades; defied them or despised them; submitted reverently to their teaching, or made fun of them.
His thought and his conversation were a perpetual flow of antitheses and a whirl of paradoxes, a forcible pushing forward of research, a ruthless sport. He could not be neutral or indifferent. He saw in everything problems that cried out for solution, questions of urgency in which it was necessary to take sides. He loved or he hated; there was no middle course for him.
She followed him and hung on his lips, with all the fervour of a disciple and lover. She annexed his ideas, and let them take root or die off in her mind as chance willed it. She had such riches to choose from that one more or less did not matter.
Of his personal affairs he talked very little. Not because he was reserved or lacking in confidence, but because he deemed them of no importance or interest. Lilly had to drag everything out of him, bit by bit.
The image of his parents had faded with time, though he still cherished an enthusiastic regard for their memory. For him his uncle had stood in the place of parents, the rich parvenu and man of the world, whose heir he would ultimately be, and to whom he now owed his freedom from sordid cares about money.
She could not quite make up her mind what their relations were to each other. Often he spoke as if he loved the old man tenderly, but at other times a hardness, even bitterness, crept into his judgment of him, showing that their natures were diametrically opposed, and there was a lack of harmony between them.
His friends were few--mostly old fellow-students, who went their own way--and he had no experience of family life. Thus he was able to bestow on Lilly all his free hours.
They met frequently in restaurants, oftenest in the little Italian wine-shop, where they wondered when the waiter turned out the lights, as it seemed to them that they had only just come.
Now and then they bought their supper at the butcher's and baker's for a few pence, and, laughing over their purchases, shook the dust of the town off their feet and retired to the Tiergarten. There they looked for an empty seat off the beaten track of the wide avenues, but not too lonely and remote. It was not till loving pairs began to wander by, like shades from the nether world, that they felt they were hidden and unseen. If a couple sat down beside them, they were sure to get up again soon, for they needed the night and darkness more urgently than these two.
Then, when the pale-green lacework of leaves, which appeared quite detached from the grey branches, darkened gradually into a shadowy black ragged outline, when the fire of the evening sky toned down into the purple of night, when the nightingale--often only a few yards away--burst into song, then they watched shoulder to shoulder the stars come out one by one and illumine the twilight, which night after night became longer. Then their thoughts rose on wings to pictures and music, to sagas of the North and Italian olive-groves. Then questions of mystery and solemnity were mooted, hesitatingly and fearfully, and answered promptly with the charity and cocksureness of a joyous young scepticism.
Lilly was left in no uncertainty as to his opinion about the immortality of the soul, the origin of the universe, and God Almighty. Often she felt as if she were left shivering alone in a vast icy-cold wilderness where there was no All-loving Father, no hope of an after-life, and much less of a St. Joseph.
"Your creed, then, is simply atheism?" she asked nervously.
"If you like to call it so, yes," he replied, laughing.
She felt forthwith bound to become an atheist too--one of those who in the eyes of Holy Church must roast for all eternity in the depths of hell. But if he could exist under the bann of excommunication, so could she. Her only regret was for St. Joseph.
How long it was since she had given her dear saint a thought! Nevertheless, it would be a pity if she could never run to him again with her joys and sorrows--at least, never without feeling ashamed of herself--especially now when her soul was burdened with so many new and varied experiences. There was nothing restful and soothing in the high art that Konrad unfolded before her; rather did she feel perpetually stimulated and goaded on to further delights and excitements.
Together they listened to all the great orchestral works the spring produced. They heard the Eroica, Brahm's Second Symphony, and a gem of Grieg's beyond expression beautiful. At concerts they joined the crowd in the cheap places, which they both loved; their hands, touching as if by accident, telegraphed with a slight pressure the vibrations of their souls' sympathy with some subtle passage of hidden beauty. Oh, what hours those were! And then those other hours which they spent high up among the "gods" at theatres, where they were far out of sight of "the crew." With Shakespeare's deathless characters, and Wagner's legendary heroines passing before her, how intensely did she realise the wretched barrenness of her previous life!
They did not neglect the modern drama either. Of all the plays he took her to, "Rosmersholm" moved her most deeply--she, with her load of concealed guilt, was the counterpart of Rebecca; he in his unsuspecting purity was Rosmer. His high-toned emotional life had, as it happened in the play, an ever-stronger and more elevating influence on hers. But what if the garbage in which her existence had its being should gradually revert from her on to him, would she not then be his evil genius and destroyer? The thought was intolerable. Even while the play was going on she cried so bitterly that she attracted the attention of people sitting near her, and Konrad proposed taking her out, but she indignantly refused to go.
Still sobbing and supported by his arm, she tottered home along the bank of the river, a path he had chosen because it was quieter and darker than the main street. When they came to the bridge across the Spree, she stopped, and seemed fascinated by the black waters below. He let her be, till she began to climb up the railed parapet to see "what it felt like." Then he pulled her down by force from her dangerous position.
"Why shouldn't I?" she thought. "When he knows all, I shall be bound to go down there and alone."
After that evening, more anxiously than ever did she devote herself daily and hourly to keeping the slightest breath of suspicion from him. She was not ashamed of her great ignorance, which she combated with all her might, but it was the loose, cynical tone to which intercourse with "the crew" had habituated her that she lived in terror of disclosing in conversation.
She braced up what had become lax in her by resuscitating the remnants of the good manners and breeding she had once practised, and so it came about that she recaptured a good deal of that inner dignity of spirit which she had assumed at the outset of her relations with Konrad. Only now it was not the mere empty acting of an affected rôle, but the outcome of all that her nature still possessed of nobility and refinement. Much that had recently dominated her mind became absolutely unintelligible to her, especially the tendency caught from her circle of regarding everything from an erotic point of view. Amazed, she saw, beyond the narrow sphere in which she had revolved, world after world opening, so full of glorious and beautiful things to be enjoyed that she had hardly time to bemoan and feel ashamed of the past.
It was true that when she remembered how she had been bold enough to kiss him, hot shame crept over her. She could not help being afraid that her behaviour on that occasion must ever remain a blot on his image of her. Yet there was not the smallest sign either in word or look that he did not reciprocate the reverence and esteem which she cherished for him. And this mutual respect always seemed to hang between them like a veil, obscuring the beloved one's features in a vertigo of happy fears which, however, robbed of their sting her self-reproaches for her failings.
There was to be no mention of love between them. Instead, they carried on a tender, almost shy, brother and sister comradeship. The word "friendship" was constantly occurring in their conversation; they extolled its sacred influence with grave faces without exactly understanding what they meant by it.
It was hard for her to endure his actual presence. The only caress that Konrad permitted himself from time to time was, when they were sitting together, to lay his right arm lightly on her shoulder. Though she would then have gladly drawn closer to him, she finally moved further away, unable to bear the torture of restraint. She never dared contemplate for a moment the remotest prospect of their being actually lovers. At night, when she couldn't sleep, she was content with picturing herself dozing on his shoulder; that was in itself supreme bliss enough; her imagination hardly ever strayed into forbidden preserves. It was as if her girlhood's modesty, which the sensuality of her old husband had so rudely outraged, had come back to throw a merciful shroud over her trembling soul. And all the wealth of golden thoughts and virginal sensations, the fairy-tale glamour that common things irradiated, the amusing importance of every tiny event, the delightful expectancy of hoping for she knew not what--all this was girlish, and reminded her of long-vanished and forgotten days.
If she had but known a single human being to whom she could have confided all this happiness and folly, how glad it would have made her! This desire to tell someone became at last almost uncontrollable. More than once she had only just checked herself in time, and nearly told Richard her secrets, risking thereby a disastrous ending.
One day she plucked up heart and journeyed to the south of Berlin to tell her former landlady some of the experiences she was passing through. The old friendship between them had never quite ceased. Even if they rarely saw each other, Lilly had taken care, by sending frequent greetings and little presents, to keep herself alive in Frau Laue's affectionate remembrance.
The present "young lady" tenant of the best room opened the door to her.
Frau Laue sat as usual at the long white work-table, with her damp finger-tips tapping energetically among the heaps of pressed flowers and the paper lamp-shade lappels. She did not stop tapping when Lilly sat down beside her, and pushed the offering of sweets that she never forgot to bring in front of her.
"No, thank you, child," she said. "Every sweet I bite is a flower the less. The likes of us can only afford to eat sweets on holidays. We have no one, you see, to give us everything heart can desire and keep us like princesses. I would like to change places with you for a day, before I go down to my grave, just to see what it feels like to have nothing to do but go for walks in the morning and feed a pair of goldfish."
"Is that your idea of happiness?" exclaimed Lilly, with a sigh.
"You are never beginning to complain of your lot!" cried Frau Laue indignantly. "If I were you I should thank the Lord every hour for having given me such a friend."
"And you think there is nothing more to wish for?" asked Lilly.
"What more can anyone want?" she scolded, still tapping. "You can't expect him to marry you now. And marriage isn't an enviable estate after anyone has gone through the mill you have.... He's sure to make you a handsome allowance if you behave yourself, and you'll never suffer want to the end of your days."
"So all my hopes are to be centred, then, on a pension?" demanded Lilly.
"Well, why not?"
"I can think of other more desirable objects in life."
"What are they then, eh? Work? Just try it! See what it is to work, after living by your emotions for years.... Or perhaps you're thinking of taking up with another lover? You'd have a fine time of it if you did. Take my advice, child, and never do that, or you'll deserve to paste flowers like me, sixteen hours a day till you die."
And while she went on ceaselessly pasting one dried plant after another on the gummed paper, she continued to lecture and admonish Lilly severely.
Lilly got up to go with a little shiver. Here she had nothing to hope for, that was evident. She looked round her, feeling suddenly as if it was all strange to her, and said to herself, "I don't think I shall ever come here again."
The next morning the tormenting desire to unburden her heart to some sympathetic ear awoke in her more strongly than ever, and she bethought her of Frau Jula.
The clever flighty little woman had been holding aloof from the set for some time. No one seemed to know what she was doing; even her red-headed admirer had no information to give, and was shy of talking about her. Still, Lilly felt sure that the sympathy she needed would be forthcoming if she could find her out.
The smart, yellow satin little nest that the red-headed one had fitted up for her near Unter den Linden was deserted. The porter told Lilly that the "gnädige Frau" had recently moved into the suburbs, as she had become nervous of the town. Lilly smiled and asked for her address, which was written down for her on a card, and then she set out to call on Frau Jula.
In a quiet wooded neighbourhood, much patronised by poets and philosophers, she had taken up her abode in a simple-looking little villa, crammed with books and manuscripts and busts of eminent men.
She herself appeared to be greatly changed. Her dark hair, which she had worn before in a wild frizz on her forehead, was now parted in the middle and smoothly brushed down over her ears in a prim fashion, which gave her an alarmingly virtuous air, although this particular style of coiffure happened just then to be the rage in circles where virtue for æsthetic reasons is not a valuable asset.
Though she welcomed Lilly as usual with outstretched arms, there was a want of spontaneity in her manner, and the delight that beamed from her eyes seemed rather forced, as if she were thinking of something else. Without asking Lilly how she was, or paying any attention to her looks or clothes, she poured forth an account of her own affairs.
"You'll be awfully surprised, of course," she said; "but I can't help it. I never made any secret to you of my little conscientious scruples, which, after all, were superfluous, as I was not so very bad."
"Oh really?" thought Lilly.
"And so you shall be the first of my former friends----"
"Former?" thought Lilly.
"To be told of my return to the bosom of respectability. To cut a long story short, I am about to get married."
"To your red-headed boy?" asked Lilly, pleased and sympathetic.
"Well, no, not exactly." She contemplated her fingernails with a pleased smile. "He has given his blessing, and there his rôle ends."
"Then who is your future husband?"
Frau Jula meditated a moment. "It is rather an old story," she said, hesitating. "You couldn't understand it unless you knew more of my inner life during the last year or two. Do you happen by any chance to have heard of Clarissa von Winkel, the authoress?"
Lilly remembered hazily having seen the name in certain old-fashioned and puritanical magazines for family reading, which she had glanced through for the sake of the pictures in cafés and confectioners' shops.
"Well, then, Clarissa von Winkel, who has gained quite a reputation as the champion of a sound domestic morality, as opposed to the dangerous modern ideas about free-love--that Clarissa von Winkel is myself."
Lilly was far too wrapped up in her own affairs to be able to bestow on the humour of these confessions the appreciation they merited, though she did experience a faint glimmer of amusement as she realised what strange pranks human puppets can be made to play in life's great farce.
"Now, don't go and jump to the conclusion that I am converted, and have become a prude and a canting bigot, or anything of the kind," Frau Jula went on, with a certain dignity of tone, which became her quite as well as her former outspoken cynicism. "There's been no Damascus in my career. I have always had, as you know, two selves. One ..." She hesitated a moment, "I needn't tell you what it was like.... The other craved for propriety, and white damask table-linen.... That is why you always attracted me so, my dearest Lilly. I couldn't help admiring your refined loyalty. Did I not always impress on you and urge you to hold fast, no matter in what circumstance you were placed, to this loyalty, which to us women is the crown of life? Don't you remember what a point I made of it?"
Lilly could not remember, but she remembered a good many other sentiments expressed by the lady at different times scarcely in accordance with it. Her friend's new outlook on the world seemed ill adapted to give her the sympathy she had come to seek in the joyous tumult of her present feelings.
"Well, to continue my story," Frau Jula said. "Through getting my articles and stories easily accepted, especially when I submitted them to editors in person, I found myself on the road to making a nice little fortune. My red-headed boy became merely a decorative appendage. For that is where virtue scores; it pays so much better than vice if you know the right way to set about it." There she slid her little tongue along her red lips, in her old arch manner, though her face remained immovably demure. "It was in the business of disposing of my work that I met my intended husband. I have got a divorce from the first brute at last.... He--this one--is the editor of a lady's paper just started, which caters for quiet domestic and housewifely tastes. It has got heaps of advertisements already. He is a man of high intellectual endowments and strictly moral principles, which, as you perceive, have not been without influence on myself."
So saying, she made a little double chin and folded her hands piously in her lap.
"And, if I may ask, how did you manage to break with your old friend?" questioned Lilly at length, almost forgetting her own trials in these extraordinary confidences.
"Break with him?... What are you talking about?" Jula answered suddenly, radiant again with foolish frivolity. "I couldn't be guilty of such heartlessness, and when I said just now that his rôle had ended, I didn't mean you to take it literally.... What on earth would the poor fellow do with his dyspeptic liver if I did not now and then invite him to a family dinner? In the first place, I have sworn solemnly to my future husband that my red-headed boy has never been anything more to me than a brother. Yes, we women can swear things like that, and not even blush in the process."
Lilly nodded thoughtfully. She, too, on a certain evening, would have taken any oath that had been desired of her.
"And, secondly, I tell you in confidence that he has contributed generously towards founding the new magazine. So the two are, as it were, colleagues and partners. I arranged matters thus intentionally, for I thought that it would be the best guarantee of the continuance of amicable relations all round. You needn't open your eyes so wide, my dear. Life is made up of compromises. Every bird feathers its own nest. Pray don't think I am afraid of disclosures and revelations. I shrug my shoulders at the notion of such a thing. You know tragedy is a matter of taste. I abhor it, so there's no tragedy in my philosophy. I say to myself, it's safe to smile perpetually so long as you are made of iron underneath."
Lilly felt slightly disgusted.
"If it is at such a price as this," she thought, "that one purges one's life of tragedy, I would rather stick to unhappiness and leave happiness alone."
She rose to go.
However much this small creature might surpass her in strength of mind and will-power, so that she now stood with both feet firmly planted on the rock of an honourable life, she was no longer a suitable friend for Lilly.
"At all events," she said aloud, "I hope that your trust won't be misplaced."
Frau Jula waved her hand in the air.
"Bah!" she sneered. "Men are all alike. Those who know the world are devourers of women; those who don't are imbeciles. I can get on with both classes."
"There is possibly a third," Lilly put in, annoyed. She felt as if Konrad had been insulted.
"Possibly," responded Frau Jula, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I don't know it." And then, putting both hands round Lilly's waist, she said: "Tell me honestly, child; when you see me as I am now, and compare me with what I was, does it strike you that I am posing?"
"To speak the truth," Lilly confessed, "it did at first."
Frau Jula sighed, "It is difficult to grow accustomed to a dress which was not made for you.... Every one of us has a certain moral ambition; no one more than the so-called immoral person. But I would like to know one thing: whether my past sins or my present virtues are more to my credit."
She smiled up at Lilly with a melancholy but mischievous face.
Lilly answered nothing. Beyond this little self-satisfied madcap she saw rising her own fate, dark and threatening as a thunder-cloud.
When she was once more in the street, her restlessness and sense of isolation took stronger possession of her than before. And yet she was thankful that she had kept silent. She knew full well that if she had submitted the portrait of her beloved to Frau Jula's acute judgment it would have been returned to her desecrated. And now she faced the fact that there was absolutely no one left in whom she could confide.
A few days later, however, in glancing, as she was in the habit of doing, through the morning paper, her eye alighted on a passage that awoke a ray of hope in her soul:
"St. Joseph's Chapel, Müllerstrasse. Vespers and Benediction" at such-and-such an hour.
Her old, long-forgotten friend and counsellor was, then, still living! He had his own church, even here in cold hardhearted heretical Berlin. In all these years she had never entered a church. Since, acting on the advice of Fräulein von Schwertfeger, she had joined the Protestants in worship, she had regarded herself as an apostate from the true Church, and had not dared to seek solace in religion, and now she had become a regular infidel. Yet the sight of the name of St. Joseph in the paper touched a soft warm place in her heart.
Her feelings were as if, after long wanderings in foreign lands, she had suddenly caught sight in the alien crowd of a dear long-lost home face. Now she knew to whom she might turn, without any fear of being misunderstood and sent empty away. Even if the great philosophers had demolished him a thousand times over, he was still there, ready to receive the outpourings of her poor silly overflowing heart.
Müllerstrasse lay somewhere in an extreme northerly direction; it was in "Franz-Josef Land," the owner of a fruit and vegetable stall, of whom she made inquiries, informed her. The way led through a network of narrow streets, from one electric tram to another, past the Reichstag buildings, the Lessing Theatre, along an interminable tree-flanked road; and beyond the Weddingplatz, which Berliners regard as the end of everywhere, the Müllerstrasse began.
No one seemed to have heard of a chapel dedicated to St. Joseph, not even people who lived in the neighbourhood. At last someone she asked said he thought there was a Catholic place up there in a yard, and after a little further exploration she found what she sought. It was a low iron building shaped like a shovel, between flowering shrubs, with high tenements surrounding it. The side door was open, and garlands of pine bid her "Welcome." She entered a plain whitewashed hall, filled with the odour of incense, laurel, and new pinewood. In the background was an alcove decorated to resemble a starry canopy. Behind the wooden balustrade that separated the pictureless chancel from the rest of the building rose two magnificent feathery palms. The low rolling tones of an organ proceeded from the loft; the organist had probably lingered behind after the funeral to improvise dreamily at the instrument.
Lilly's eyes wandered anxiously over the walls in quest of the shrine of her saint. She wondered if he held up his finger here in smiling warning, as did the kind old gentleman of St. Ann's in her native town.
There was no room for side altars, as every inch of space was filled with benches. But that big picture over there in tawdry gilt frame, with a console-table beneath piled with dusty nosegays, was that----? She started back, shocked. Her saint, her own dear beloved saint was simply absurd, with his sharp-featured, wax-doll's face, his flaxen beard and seraphically pious smile. An infant Jesus in pink sat triumphal on one arm, while in his other hand he daintily clasped a spray of lilies. And pity succeeded her horror. How far behind her, how infinitely far away, was the time when one could worship and pray for miracles to a saint like this!
Could her good, faithful monitor in St. Ann's have been like this? She hardly dared think of such a thing. He couldn't; no, he couldn't have been so insipid and ridiculous. One place on earth must remain to which one's memory in hours of smiling pensive melancholy might return on holy pilgrimages. The organ began the prelude to an exquisite mass of Scarlatti's with which Lilly had been familiar in her girlhood, and so gradually she became more at home in the little chapel.
She knelt on a bench at the back, shut her eyes, and tried to fancy that instead of this flaxen-haired caricature her real old friend was looking down on her.
A saying of St. Thomas Aquinas came into her head that she had learnt in class when a child: "Other saints have been given the power by God to help us in certain circumstances, but to St. Joseph has been granted the power to help us no matter what our need may be."
Such a power he had once had in her life. So she spoke to him again for the last time across the waste of years that separated her from the altar in St. Ann's. She was sure it would be the last time, because for such childish things there could no longer be room in her soul. And as she felt it was a farewell talk, she related, without reserve, everything that had happened to her: how supremely happy she had become; how she felt an awakening of new life within her, and her dead self blossoming forth afresh, while the whole of creation seemed one great symphony of joy. And she told him, too, of the gross deception she was forced to practise, of her fear of discovery, and of the delicious expectant tremors for which she could find no name.
Then she added that she no longer had any faith in him, and was, to all intents and purposes, an atheist. Feeling reconciled, she placed the carnations she had brought as an offering to the poor saint among the dusty nosegays, and with a lighter heart went out, laughing, to meet the spring that laughed at her.
There was not only this new-born Lilly who rode on the crest of the wave far above all earthly cares and annoyances, but another Lilly, who every other night enchanted her old set with her triumphant humour, her élan, and brilliant wit, which amazed and took everyone by storm. Richard, when he came to tea in the afternoon, never ceased to wonder at the change in her. Instead of the gloomy listlessness, which had characterised her for so long, he found her sprightly and full of gay pranks, a creature of surprises, never still for a moment.
He accustomed himself readily to this new aspect of her being, though it slightly abashed him, owing to his inability to keep pace with her; and he praised the magical effects of the new tonic, hæmatogen, which the doctor, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, had prescribed this spring instead of iron.
Every night that they went out together on pleasure bent, the same little comedy was enacted. At first she would say that she had caught cold, or had a headache, that she was not in a mood for meeting people; but when once he had prevailed on her to come, she would play with her admirers as if they were puppies, and tell her lady friends things to their faces that filled them with nervous gratification. Sometimes, it is true, she would sit apart in sulky self-absorption, lost in dreams, though now, if anyone teased her for doing it, she neither blushed nor looked uncomfortable, but made such sharp, stinging repartees that the men retired and hid their diminished heads. Only once during this period did she drink herself into a light-headed condition, and that happened to be on the very day that she at last decided to tell Richard about her new friend. She had grappled with the question for two months. It would have to be done in the end, but indecision as to how she should do it made her put it off from day to day.
She was helped in her quandary by chance. One day Richard brought her some sketches of vases about which he wanted her opinion, and forgot to take them away with him when he left. Afterwards Konrad came across them, and with a few swift pencil-strokes inserted the outline which was in the original draft, but which the artist had omitted in developing the plan. The next day Richard was utterly astonished to find that the corrections had been made, and so accurately. Who was responsible for them? Lilly, with recollections of her bungled glass-plaque painting, dared not say that she was, and courageously took the bull by the horns.
"My art history master made the corrections," she said.
"How long have you had an art history master?" he asked with round severe eyes.
To his surprise and consternation, she began to rate him soundly. She asked if he expected her to spend a miserable barren and frivolous existence till the end of her days. Did he think it was a crime for a woman of no occupation to try and improve her mind a little, so that she might be clever enough to talk to a sensible man like him and his associates? Surely that was better than spending all her time on gossip and finery, and going to the dogs dressed up like a frivolous doll.
The phrase, "a sensible man like you," mollified him considerably.
"It's all very well," he said in a milder tone, "but why not have told me before?"
She now began a long story.
She had seen an advertisement about six weeks ago in the Lokal Anzeiger, in which an erudite young scholar offered his services as coach to ladies and gentlemen with a thirst for self-improvement. She had answered it, and the scholar had come and arranged a course of lessons forthwith. It had led to a friendship between master and pupil--of a purely platonic nature, of course. She had made up her mind, she said, not to tell him, being afraid of exciting his jealousy, till she was able to convince him of the absolute disinterestedness of her intellectual endeavours by proving their success.
He knit his brow, and a sardonic smile, which she could not account for, played about his lips.
"So you have got a young scholar for a friend again?" he asked, leaning his head on one side and winking at her.
"Yes, and I am proud of it."
"I suppose he's going to be Regius professor?"
"He hasn't made up his mind what he's going to be."
"He is extremely brilliant, intellectual, and superior, I presume?"
She cast up her eyes ecstatically. "I should think so. I have never met anyone like him." She stopped short, horrified at her own indiscretion.
"Ha! ha! I see," he said, as if some long-cherished suspicion had been confirmed. "I see," and he got very red, and gnawed his moustache. "Didn't I say what it would be?"
"You are jealous!" she cried. She felt herself writhing under a shameful injustice.
Without another word he departed, scowling. An hour later a parcel from Liebert & Dehnicke's was left at the door. As she opened it, a light suit which she had seen Richard wear the summer before fell out. The note that accompanied the parcel ran as follows:
"Darling Lilly,
"You see that I am true to my promise of coming to the assistance of your intellectual affinities with cast-off wearing apparel. I shall be happy, too, to send another supply of old boots to help them on their road to success. This will show you how jealous I am.
"Yours,
"Richard."
That same evening she was in such exuberant spirits that she drank wine immoderately; and never, not even when she had danced for Dr. Salmoni's delectation, had she let herself go with such unbridled abandon and exercised her art of mimicry with wilder éclat.
To wind up with, she danced on the top of the tables, joined together, a Salome dance which was just then the rage. She accompanied herself through her clenched teeth with quaint Eastern snatches of melody.
"What on earth is that gibberish?" the spectators asked each other.
Afterwards, when they put the question to her herself, she was incapable of giving an answer. Insensible, she heard and saw nothing more.