CHAPTER XXII
The world wagged on, calmly, merrily, busily, as if nothing had happened, as if nowhere on the ocean of life a lost happiness was drifting every minute farther and farther away, as if no forsaken and abandoned human child cowered in a corner, staring with despairing eyes helplessly at the floor.
Frau Laue tapped at her lamp-shades, the fried potatoes frizzled in the fat-lined pan; the stove in the lobby smoked, and the frowsy poor-people's odour exhaled a welcome to all who came within its radius. She did not cry her heart out of her body, as she had done after her expulsion from the castle. She neither lapsed into a dazed apathy nor wrestled desperately with fate. Instead, she felt that a grey yawning void stretched before her endlessly, the silence of which was broken now and then by a shrill cry of almost animal longing and despair, a sense of feeble submission to the inevitable, a consciousness of being incarcerated without hope of escape, a baffled slipping down into life's dark depths, a dreary death unmarked by grace or dignity.
Between to-day and to-morrow--the to-morrow that seemed to beckon from every corner--Lilly's tearless eyes saw the railings of the bridge that her feet had tested on the way home from "Rosmersholm." And, as she stared into space, she beheld the dark, purple-flecked waters rolling languidly on far below, and heard the iron chains clank under her feet.
This sound grew into a perpetual sing-song that accompanied everything she did, floated over and swallowed up everything that the eventless days brought forth. It pierced her brain, hammered in her temples, and throbbed painfully in every nerve and pore of her body.
Only one word was set to this haunting melody, and that was "Die." Yes--die. What could be simpler? What more irresistible?
Die! not to-day; but to-morrow perhaps, or the day after. Something might happen yet. A letter might come, or he himself. Or if not this, who could know that fate was not holding some other miracle of good fortune up its sleeve?
So it was worth while living to-day, to drag through its countless hours of deadly monotony.
Then one evening, a week after Konrad's sudden departure, Frau Laue appeared in Lilly's room at an unaccustomed hour. Her manner denoted determination.
"Now look here, Lilly dear," she began. "Things can't go on like this. If you were crying your heart out I shouldn't say anything. But, as you are acting now, matters will never mend. There is only one sensible course that you can take; you must return to your Herr Dehnicke. If he had any inkling of how things were going with you here, trust him, he would have come and taken you away long ago. So I tell you plainly, either you sit down and write him a nice letter or I shall leave my work in the lurch and go straight off to his office to-morrow morning. He'll pay my expenses fast enough."
Lilly felt a strong impulse to turn the old woman out of the room, but she was too depressed to do more than turn away from her with impotent distaste.
"I haven't too much time to spare now," Frau Laue continued; "the dozen must be completed before bedtime.... But you can make your mind easy as to one thing. If he is not here by ten o'clock to-morrow, he'll be here by twelve, for I shall have gone to fetch him. Good-night, Lilly dear."
In melancholy scorn she sent a scoffing laugh after Frau Laue. This, then, was the stroke of good fortune which fate had in store for the morrow? Once more she was to cringe to man's puerile supremacy, and live in enervating servitude--vegetate amidst fleeting and unprofitable pleasures in a perfumed lethargy, or be goaded by ennui and disgust to walk the streets.
Yet, if he came the next day, she knew she would not have the power to resist. Richard would only have to look at her with that whipped-dog expression, which was something quite new for him, and the mere thought of which filled her with a shamefaced tenderness, and she would throw her arms round his neck and have a good cry on his shoulder.
Was it worth waiting another to-morrow for that? No; better to die to-day.
To-day! A feeling of ecstasy came over her. She ran about the room, with folded hands, weeping and exulting. She would be a heroine like Isolde, a martyr for her love.
And there the railings of the bridge were waiting ready for her. How they would creak and groan when she set her feet on them!
Now the sing-song in her head was so loud that she thought it must kill her. The air resounded with a whirl of tones. The walls echoed them. The noise of the street, the capital's roar of traffic, all sang ... "Die--die--die!"
She pulled off her evening wrapper and dressed herself to go out. At first she thought of putting on one of the badly fitting dresses because they were connected with Konrad, but her heart failed her.
"Die beautifully," Hedda Gabler had said.
"If only I had his photograph that I might take a farewell look into his eyes," she thought. But she had nothing but his letters and a few verses. They should accompany her on her last walk.
They lay at the bottom of the leather trunk, which was still concealed in Frau Laue's box-room, though there had long been no one from whom it was necessary to conceal it. As she rummaged in its depths to find the little packet, she put her hand by accident on the roll of old music manuscript.
She looked tenderly at the yellow-stained sheet into which the rest was fitted. She was no longer vexed with her "Song of Songs," and did not despise it, as on that ill-fated morning when she had hunted it up again; the morning on which she had gone out to break her vow to Konrad.
Now once more it was a dear, precious possession, not a guide, philosopher, and friend, not a miracle-working sacred relic, but just an old keepsake which we treasure and water with our tears because it is a bit of our own life.
And a bit of our own blood!
For there were still those dark stains on the paper. Her blood had fallen on it when she set forth on life's journey, and now that the journey was ending the deep waters should wash the blood-stains away.
With the score lying in her lap, she looked beyond it into the sorrowful past. It seemed to her as if mists were lifting and curtains were being drawn aside, and she saw the path that she had trodden winding backwards at her feet, like a clearly defined boundary.
She had been weak and often stupid. Her own interests and the main chance she had never considered. Every man who had entered her life had been able to do what he liked with her. Not once had she barred her soul, shown fight, or exercised to the full the sovereignty of her beauty. She had only been eager to oblige and to love and be kind to everyone. In reward, she had been hunted and bullied and dragged through the mud all her life long. Even the one man who had respected her had gone away without saying good-bye.
"But I've never hated anybody," she thought. "And no matter what I have suffered, or how I have transgressed, I have always been able to feel there was something in me out of the common, and this at the last seems as if it had been a gift from Heaven."
Did it not really seem as if this "Song of Songs," which now lay before her, defaced, stained, and rotted, like her own career, had been all along blessing and absolving her the presiding genius she had believed it to be as a child, and fancied it afterwards during the rapture of her abandonment to her love for Konrad?
"Yes, you shall come too," she said. "You shall die when I die."
And she carefully wrapped the battered papers together. Then she found the letters, and read them through two or three times, but without taking in what she read.
The clock struck twelve as she stepped softly out on to the landing. Frau Laue was asleep. She met no one on the stairs, and unseen walked into the street.
Since her flight to Konrad that memorable night she had not been out alone in the streets so late. Everything looked as if she saw it for the first time: the long rows of houses bathed in crude light, the trolleys of the electric trams in between, and the gliding figures of night-revellers.
A numbing terror seized her. Her legs felt wooden, as if stilts were screwed on to them, propelling her forward whether she would or not, without rest; and her heels tapped ceaselessly on the pavement, carrying her nearer and nearer her goal. Whenever she met anyone she felt an impulse to hide herself, fancying that it would be noticed where she was going. For this reason she dived into dark back-streets, which were unevenly paved and where fading lime-trees scattered their drops of rain. She passed straggling brick buildings inhospitably shut in behind high back-garden walls; slaughter-houses and factories; and all the time her heels went tap-tap-tap, as if she had a pedometer attached to them, registering every inch which shortened her road.
She tried to remember other short-cuts to her bridge, but couldn't find them, and gave up the attempt.
"What thou doest, let it be done quickly," she had read somewhere. So she pressed forward with clenched teeth.
The Engelbecken was dark and deserted; yellow lights were reflected dimly in its unfathomable waters. "Here it would be easier," she thought, breathless from the oppression at her heart. But, shuddering, she retreated from the grass slopes. The bridge must be somewhere over there to the north-west. Fate had ordained that she should go to the bridge.
It was still a long way off, quite an hour's walk. She came into more frequented ways. The rows of lights in front of the dancing saloons, where prostitutes caroused, cast their garish beams like finger-posts into the night. Cabs were waiting there, and sounds of revelry came from within. Forwards, forwards--always forwards! Hot, garlic-laden fumes were wafted to her nostrils from a cellar-café that kept its doors open. When had she smelt something like that before? Why, of course, when Frau Redlich was cooking the sausages for her son's farewell dinner.
In front of her a hose as thick as her wrist sent a cleansing shower-bath over the street. What did that hissing, gurgling sound remind her of? Why, of course, of old Haberland watering the lawn with the old-fashioned sprinkler. And then all at once the thought shot through her brain: "None of this is really happening. I am lying in bed between the bookcases, and behind me the hanging lamp that I took down is smoking ... and this is all in an old novel that I am reading, while Frau Asmussen has luckily gone to sleep after taking her medicine."
A growing tumult called her back to actual life. She had reached the heart of the city, the spot where the whirl of Berlin's never-flagging nightly dissipations reaches its height. She came to the Spittelmarkt, and onwards the huge Leipziger Strasse unrolled its chain of lights like a pearl necklace. Buried in a mist of silver, dotted with the glimmering red lanterns of night cafés and cabarets, it was like a brilliant picture toned down with sepia.
The numb feeling in Lilly's legs increased. She walked, and was hardly conscious that she moved at all. She only felt the tremendous force of her heart-beats, which made her whole body vibrate like a mill.
In the Friedrichstrasse there were nearly as many people about as by day. Young men pursued their smiling quarry, and the lamplight was reflected in the silk hose of the tripping grisettes.
"Once submerged in this sort of world," Lilly thought with a gruesome envy, "and one is disturbed by no sense of wounded honour or suicidal impulses."
Ah! but on the other side of this bright, laughing, jostling crowd came peace and darkness again, in the shelter of which you might die unseen and unknown.
Through the noise she still heard her heels tapping. Why shouldn't she go into some café, she asked herself? Even if someone saw her, what did it matter? It would give her one miserable quarter of an hour's breathing space. Lights, mirrors, velvet seats, blue cigarette-smoke, a clink of crystal, a pricking in her parched throat. Just once--once more ... not a quarter ... but a whole hour, and one more poor little bit of life would be hers, which could do no one else any harm. But she could find no justification for such a cowardly action, and determined that her last walk should be disgraced by no such weakness. And she went on, on and on.
The merry vortex of the Kranzlerecke was left behind; the daggers of light stabbed her no more. Lilly hardly knew where she was going. Most likely she was in one of those quiet cross-streets which led to the north-west end. The middle of the deserted street glistened with puddles. The rainy autumnal wind came sweeping along between the houses, and the cold lamplight was reflected in their dark windowpanes. Everything round her here seemed lifeless and extinct; only a human phantom glided forth at intervals, and cats chased each other noiselessly into obscurity.
Lilly shivered, and clasped the score tighter in her arms. As she tried to catch a sight of her reflection in the glass window of a florist's, the blinds of which were not drawn down, she started. There she saw stiff branches of evergreen laurels and cypresses encircling a bust of the Kaiser; that recalled something strongly to her mind. What was it? Ah! of course. They reminded her of the Clytie which reigned on the pretentious private staircase of Liebert & Dehnicke's, smiling and dreaming. Lilly Czepanek would never now ascend that green-shaded stairway, either as a penitent or a triumphant sinner.
She had chosen a better way, which led more directly to the great goal.
She came to a bridge, and crossed it quickly. That other bridge, with the iron palisade, which sung her such alluring cradle-songs, was further away in the open, buried in darkness and silence.
"You overflow with a superfluity of love ... three kinds of love: love emanating from the heart, the senses, and from compassion. One kind everybody has; two are dangerous; all three lead to ruin!"
Who had said that?
Why, to be sure, her first flame--that poor consumptive lecturer on the history of art, whom she and Rosalie Katz had clubbed together to send to the promised land, the land which she herself had never seen. He had spoken of the blue haze of the olives, of fields of shining asphodel, and the black sirocco sea.
"Fields of shining asphodel." What sort of fields could they be, fields of asphodel?
The foreign word sounded strange, and oh, how full of enchantment! But her heels still went tap-tap, and the cradle-song of the palisade thundered in between.
A man addressed her: "Would she ...?"
She shook him off as if he had been a reptile.
Then she remembered another warning that had been given her, also divided into three heads--whose was that? Oh, now she recollected: Dr. Pieper's. It came back to her, every word and sentence of the pompous utterance sounding in her ears as clearly as if it had been spoken only yesterday, "There are three things to beware of: Exchange no superfluous glances; demand no superfluous rendering of accounts; make no superfluous confessions."
"If I had not exchanged superfluous glances I should have seen my promised land. If I had not superfluously demanded a rendering of account, I should never have been kicked out of Lischnitz. And if I had not made superfluous confessions...."
Well, what then?
"Konni! Konni!" she wailed. A shudder of yearning overwhelmed her painfully, and restrained her wandering thoughts.
She walked on, staggering. Fresh lines of street vanished in mist, and at one spot a grass lawn reared its unevenly clipped hedge.
"What sort of fields could they be, fields of shining asphodel?"
Ah! here was the bridge. The bridge!
Like a thief in the night it loomed in the darkness, above the wide, deserted spaces, where the lights of thousands of street-lamps dwindled into infinitesimal sparks. Somewhere in the dark sky shone the mild face of a full-moon. It was the illuminated clock of a railway station, the shadowy outline of which was swallowed up by the darkness. The hands pointed to half-past one.
Lilly saw it all dimly, as through a haze. She had sunk, paralysed with terror, against the corner of the wall, which she had intended to turn. Her heart throbbed so convulsively that she thought she must fall down dead.
"No; I can't do it!" she said to herself. And then came her own answer: "But I can--I will!"
She tried to stagger a few steps further, on to the bridge where the railings seemed to be waiting for her in malice; but her legs refused to carry her. The singing in her head rose to a roar of thunder. She stood hesitating on the dark, forsaken spot; with both hands she struggled to tear the score and crumple it into a ball, but it would not yield. Her "Song of Songs" was stronger than she was. Then, all at once, her feet began to move as if of their own accord, and took her step by step beyond the lamp-post to the railings. Yes, now the chains of the palisade were between her fingers. She could see nothing of the water below but a dark slimy shimmer. So murky was it that even the lamps were not reflected in it.
Now all she had to do was to jump--and it would be over.
"Yes, I'll do it! I'll do it!" a voice within her cried.
But "The Song of Songs" must go first. It would be in the way, and hinder her climbing over the railings.
She threw it. A white flash, a splash below, harsh and shrill, which made her shake in every limb, as if her face had been slapped. And when she heard it, she knew instantly that she would never do it. No, never! Lilly Czepanek was no heroine. No martyr to her love was Lilly Czepanek. No Isolde, who finds in the will not to exist the highest form of self-existence. But she was only a poor exploited and plundered human creature who must drag on through life as best she could. She would not go back to the old round of degrading dissipations, however much Richard might look like a whipped dog. Of that she was determined; and she began forthwith to review the few possibilities left of her earning an honest living.
Perhaps all would come right in the end, though she could not disguise the fact that she had completely lost her zeal for work, and was never likely to find it again. All she asked was to be allowed to live in peace and the exercise of virtue. Did not millions of human beings think there was nothing better?
She cast one more searching glance at the sullenly rolling river in which "The Song of Songs" had found its grave, and then turned and walked away.
In the business circles of Berlin there was a flutter of surprise the following spring when the papers announced that Herr Richard Dehnicke, senior partner of the well-known old firm of Liebert & Dehnicke, art bronze manufacturers, had married Lilly Czepanek, a notorious beauty of the demimonde. The announcement added that the pair had taken up their quarters temporarily in Southern Italy. Those who knew her were not surprised--they said that they had always felt Lilly Czepanek was a dangerous woman.