CHAPTER XXIII
"DEAREST HERR VON PRELL,
"You will have concluded from what has happened that all must be over between us. Yes, everything has come to an end. We shall never meet again except at table. If you ask whether this makes me sad I will be brave and say 'No,' in the hope that it will cause you to feel our parting less. But the question is not whether we find it difficult or easy. We have to consider whether our feelings in the matter are elevating and humanly disinterested. True self-sacrifice must be the keystone of our lives. Yes, I expect from you the nobility of renunciation. The whole of our future must be dedicated to memories alone. Are we ever likely to enjoy again such exquisite hours as we have spent together? I have done with thoughts of happiness, and so must you too. Henceforth my one sacred duty will be my husband's welfare, and I must request you to devote all the energy you are capable of to the reordering of your life. You know life is a very sacred thing. I feel that it is so, since I have had a kind woman friend to set me on the right road, and I want you to feel it too.
"This letter is my last. You may write to me just once. Please do, and put your answer in the pea-shooter, which still stands as before in the corner of the balcony. Ah! indeed, I shall have no peace till I know that our souls are united by the same desires. Good-bye, and when you come to meals, be sure you make no secret reference to what has been. It would only be painful to me, and I should doubt your good faith.
"Always yours in true sisterly affection,
"L. v. M."
"Gracious Friend and Lady,
"The profound emotions I have experienced since my last interview with our honoured Fräulein von Schwertfeger are only deepened by your most kind lines. I feel a great impulse to perform deeds of atonement never yet attempted. I am ready to heap scorn and contumely on the seven deadly sins. I will take as example all the paragons of virtue the world has ever known, and will try to find in the lofty renunciation you demand of me that undiluted happiness which is the only kind devoid of the sting of remorse--an advantage which cannot have much weight with one so fatally constituted that he has heard of such a thing but never felt it.
"Thus, dearest and most charming of women, farewell! We certainly had a good time. I can swear to this without committing perjury. Should you require more pledges for the future, I can also swear, first, to abhor alcohol; second, to shun the fair sex like the plague; third, to devote to the Encyclopædia of Agriculture unremitting love and attention, two volumes of seven hundred and twenty pages each notwithstanding.
"Once more, farewell! The ladder of my hopes, which I have climbed for the last time, shall find a wintry grave under fir cones and branches. When the times comes, may it rise therefrom to greet a new spring.
"Till then, I kiss in all constancy your slim and refreshingly large hand.
"Yours,
"Already reformed,
"Walter von Prell."
Lilly found this letter, on the morning but one after the foregoing events, stuffed in the mouth of the pea-shooter, which reposed innocently against the balcony glass doors. It cannot be said that it gave her unlimited satisfaction. There were expressions in it that raised scepticism with regard to the sincerity of his conversion. Yet his assurances of amendment were so frank and concise, one could not doubt that the sentiment that prompted him to make them was genuine. It was only that he could not give up the incorrigible levity with which he expressed himself. Those who loved him must tolerate this eccentricity, whether they liked it or not.
She kissed the letter and put it inside her blouse, that it might rest there comfortably for a little while before being torn up.
In the afternoon she went for a stroll round the castle, and found under the balcony a heap of fir-branches freshly gathered, out of which a rung or two of the buried ladder greeted her confidentially. Pleased at this tender evidence of his pain at parting from her, she ran on to the boggy outskirts of the park, and marvelled every now and then at the easiness of renunciation.
Yet it proved not so easy after all. She began to discover this during the next few days of reaction, when life seemed hollow and barren of excitement, when the sad grey autumn hours passed drearily and evening came, followed by morning, apparently without rhyme or reason.
She did not did in Anna von Schwertfeger's society the solace and support she had hoped for. Although her friend did not withdraw her promises, she remained behind a wall of reserve, which made any close and loving intimacy out of the question. It almost seemed as if she was afraid of being implicated in the sinner's guilt, if she encouraged Lilly's advances.
At this time Lilly had to put up with a great deal from the colonel. His outbursts of ungovernable fury now fell on her, as on the rest of the household. But what she dreaded more was the gloomy, threatening glance he fixed on her at moments when she sat indulging in quiet introspection; she felt instinctively that something was in his mind that boded her no good. She began even to fear that he had got wind of her affair with Prell. But Fräulein von Schwertfeger would not hear of such a thing.
"If that were so," she said, "he would adopt a rather different procedure. Broken chairs and smashed lamps would be the consequence of his first-awakened suspicion. I think the matter stands thus: he is bored to extinction at home, he is hankering for the regiment, and he holds you, child responsible for the change in his manner of living. God forbid that he gets to hate you for it, otherwise, as far as I can see, you will have no choice but to get a separation--or commit suicide."
All this was not very consoling. No less discouraging was his persistent refusal to introduce her to his neighbours. Anna assured him Lilly's education was long ago complete, and no colonel's dame could find anything amiss in her manners. Yet he looked at her in distrust, and put off the visits week after week.
Nevertheless, Lilly cheerfully endured her troubles. Belief in herself and in him buoyed her up, and gave her strength and composure. She made herself out a time-table, so that every hour of the day should be occupied. She learnt Goethe's lyrics by heart, she read Shakespeare in English, pored over Art books and studied the labyrinthine history of the French Revolution. Especially attractive reading did she find in a big geographical tome containing illustrations of Southern harbours and tropical forests, rocky mountains, and the like. Italy, too, was represented. There were pious pilgrims praying at shrines, mystic churches and buildings, slender pillared porticos, and all filled her with the old hunger to wander under those sunny skies.
And so she lost her way travelling in spirit in foreign countries, to look round suddenly and find herself face to face with a fair young man with freckles in a black and white check suit stiffly bowing and saying, "as gracious baroness commands." Then tears sprang to her eyes. Her only distraction now was to stand at the balcony door, and over the rampart of Virginian creeper, the last leaves of which fluttered about like red flags, to gaze across at the outside of the bailiff's house. Of course, he had no idea she was there. Oh, how proud she felt of him! For she saw him spending all his spare hours with the Encyclopædia of Agriculture on the window ledge. Quickly she caught up her geographical work again, fired by his example not to idle.
In the evening he closed the shutters early, and drew the heavy curtains, which he had put up in his wild days, so close that not a crack of light glimmered through. But Lilly hadn't the smallest doubt that the lamp went on burning far into the night, and that he sat over his books copying memorable passages, and revelling in great creative ideas. And she revelled with him, for now she knew he could not fall. She had his word, and he her honour in his keeping. This must be his talisman leading him on to a higher life. So the weeks went on.
He excused himself from appearing on Sundays, and she was grateful to him. Another thing she congratulated herself on was that in that fatal night she had caught a cold, which the doctor said was severe enough to prevent her rides for the rest of the winter. Probably Fräulein von Schwertfeger had a hand in this too.
One morning early in December it happened that the colonel varied his ordinary confirmed grumpiness and appeared at table in excellent spirits. He chuckled to himself, looked into vacancy with eyes that twinkled, and seemed to be shaking inwardly with suppressed laughter.
Lilly ventured to inquire what was the cause. At first he declined to tell her. "Rubbish! Mind your own business," he said, but finally he could not keep the news to himself.
"Now, would you believe it?" he began. "I was warned lately at the Casino to keep an eye on my young Prell. It turns out from all accounts that he has been haunting low quarters at night, and has distinguished himself in a brawl about some little baggage of a barmaid."
Lilly felt a freezing sensation rise from her feet and slowly creep up her spine. Her limbs became numb. She smiled, and the smile cut into her cheeks like the sharp corners of a stone.
"At first I laughed at them," he went on, "for, in the only train that goes out and comes in of an evening, I have been a passenger myself, as you know, every day. No horse could stand twenty miles each way for long. And the pocket-money I give him wouldn't pay for a special train. So I told our major. But he stuck to his story, and said he had heard it from the younger men, and that it would be a pity if the boy was stripped of his uniform. When I got to the station at one, it struck me that I had time to search the train from end to end, which I did--fourth class and all. Not a sign of him of course. I did the same the next night and the next, and went on doing it till I was sick, even calling up the inspector to ask if he could give me a clue. He couldn't, he called out from inside, half asleep. So I began to think the whole thing a swindle. Now, just listen to this: yesterday evening when I got to the station here and was already in the carriage, I remembered that I had forgotten my umbrella, an appendage to which I can never get accustomed. So I went back for it. The station was quite empty, but the train was still standing there; and just as I passed the luggage van, which had its doors wide open, I saw someone jump out on the line on the other side. I shouted 'Stop!' but he bolted off into the woods. It flashed into my mind that it was Prell. I told Heinrich to drive like the devil, and in less than ten minutes we were here. Then I reflected he must have heard the sound of wheels from the footpath, and I went straight to my room and turned on the lights. I wanted him to think I was there. Did I disturb you, Lilly? By Jove, Lilly!" and he started, "I never saw such a face!"
"What's the matter with it?" she asked, faintly smiling again.
"She hasn't been well all day," interposed Anna hurriedly. "Your story too, colonel, is rather exciting. I am quite wound up."
"Humph!" he ejaculated, twisting his dyed moustache, and he seemed unwilling to take up the thread of his tale again. But Lilly could not maintain her composure.
"I must know the rest, I must!" she cried, clasping her hands imploringly, quite beside herself.
"Very well," said the colonel, fixing his eyes on her. "I went down again quickly and stood in ambush before the bailiff's house. Two minutes--and my gentleman comes along, slouching like a pole-cat, stands still, looks up and eyes my room, sees the light, and thinks, 'Ha, ha! it's all right.' Then just as he puts his latchkey in the door, I collar him."
Lilly burst into a fit of wild laughter. "Oh, how funny! How very funny!" she exclaimed, and this time the colonel believed her.
"Yes; but something funnier is coming," he continued. "I said to him, 'If you confess the whole truth, I'll forgive you; if not, you'll go packing to-morrow early.' And then it came out--what do you think the rascal has been up to? Carrying on with the barmaid at the Golden Apple, if you please--the resort of non-commissioned officers and clerks. So that he might loaf there at his ease, he bribed the porters, and actually went and came back in the same train with me evening after evening concealed in the luggage van. If that isn't impudence, I don't know what is--eh, Lilly?"
There was a pause. She felt herself tossing on a stormy sea, a boiling and singing in her ears, and felt at the same moment Anna's hand closing on hers under the table, in warning pressure.
"Yes, it certainly is very funny," she said.
The tone in which she spoke was not convincing, for another pause ensued.
Then the colonel rose, took her head between his hands, pressing it so hard she thought her ears would split, and said:
"You certainly appear in need of rest."
With this he turned on his heel and went out of the dining-room.
"Now pull yourself together, dear," Lilly heard her friend's voice urging her, "because after this he'll be on the qui vive."
Lilly was going to throw herself on Fräulein von Schwertfeger's bosom, hoping to be petted and consoled, but she held herself aloof, as if she feared being caught in too intimate converse with Lilly, and said in a tone of strained friendliness:
"Excuse me, Lilly dear. There is something I must attend to at once," and she too left the room.
"What now?" she thought.
She looked about her. The remains of their abruptly finished meal were still on the table. The dark oak furniture cast shining black shadows into the wintry half-light of the room. The old brass chandeliers gleamed dully. All was as it always was, and yet there was nothing there--only a cruel, all-devouring void, an abyss which lured her into its depths as if drawing her with hooks and pulleys.
She went to the window, and looked out apathetically. The bare branches shook in the wind, the ivy on the railing swayed; even the bent rose-trees, the shoots of which the old gardener had protected with straw, moved quiveringly backwards and forwards. All of them writhed in the grip of winter, and only the fallen leaves lying in heaps on the thin coating of snow were still, but they were dead eternally.
What was to be done now?
If this could happen, then all was in vain. There was no hope, no rising to loftier heights, no more strength of purpose, and no more truth. You might as well throw yourself down on the ground beside the dead leaves and die.
She heard the clatter of plates behind her. The maid-servant, as no one had rung, had come unsummoned with old Ferdinand to clear the table. She thought of Käte and of that other creature, in whose arms he had made a mock of her and of her faith in him. She dragged her lifeless legs upstairs to the only room in the house where she ever felt at home. As she passed she heard the colonel raving in his bedroom, and almost running as he paced up and down.
"Let him rave!" she thought indifferently.
Next she heard him give orders from behind the closed door for the carriage to come round.
"He may stay or go, for all I care," she thought.
She stepped on to the balcony. The icy-cold sensation that still stiffened her neck crept down her arms to her finger tips.
Over there sat Walter, employing his leisure as usual in deep study of the great Encyclopædia of Agriculture. He lifted his hand every now and then wearily to his brow and knocked the ash from his cigarette against a flower-pot without looking up. He hadn't time to look up. Good God!
Confronted by this abominable farce, enacted solely with the object of deceiving her, Lilly was seized with such mad, accusing fury that she was rendered almost senseless. A pricking and stinging ran through her benumbed arms. Then an excruciating burning fever throbbed painfully in her temples and hung a blood-red curtain before her eyes.
She saw nothing more, heard nothing more.
She rushed down the stairs, tore back the bolt of the garden door, sprang down the terrace steps, and flew like mad across the lawn to the bailiff's lodge.
What did she care whether anyone saw her or not? At this moment she minded nothing. She didn't so much as knock at his door, but opened it with a vigour that sent it swinging against the wall. A hateful, pungent smell like the interior of a menagerie greeted her nostrils. He was still at the window, and bounded up when he saw her.
The grey daylight shone on the top of his head.
"He's got his hair cut like a clothes-brush again," she thought. "The fast life he's now leading requires that it should be so. He must look a swell."
"Lord in heaven!" he said, crumbling his lighted cigarette between his fingers. "This is a pretty rumpus."
"Why--why have you----?" she shrieked incoherently. "Oh, you blackguard! you dishonourable scoundrel!"
"Damn it!" he said, looking round him in despair, "I don't see how the gracious baroness is to get out of this without compromising herself."
"I don't care! You have broken your word; you have thrown away what was sacred between us--thrown it to a low barmaid ... a barmaid, a person who would hang round the neck of any man who gave her twopence ... You are a miserable wretch, not worth trying to save ... You won't be saved ... You insist on going to the dogs as fast as you can ..."
"That's all well and good," he said, "and you may be stating very deplorable and indisputable facts; but what I should like to know, dear baroness, is how you mean to save yourself?"
"I am absolutely indifferent with regard to myself!" she exclaimed. "I have come here to have it out with you ... I demand an explanation here--now--instantly--on the spot."
"With pleasure, gracious baroness," he answered, "but first, for God's sake, move away from the window."
Whereupon he cast a swift, keen, nervous glance across at the windows of the castle, which so far looked unsuspecting enough.
Shocked by his rudeness, she fled into the interior of the apartment. It was low-ceilinged, dark, and badly furnished, like a labourer's dwelling. The obnoxious doggy odour was here more strongly apparent. Where it came from was a mystery revealed a moment later, when, as she approached the wall at the back of the room, something snapped viciously at her foot, and two little circlets of fire gleamed angrily in the dusk.
"Behave yourself. Tommy," he commanded as she drew back with a cry.
So it was Tommy, the third party to the Triple Alliance!
She leaned against the back of the old spindle-legged sofa. Its worn springs creaked and its bristly horsehair pricked her hands. The thought shot through her brain: "What am I doing here? How does it concern me?"
He glided meanwhile, listening hard, from door to door.
"If old Leichtweg happened to be in the next room," he said, "there'd be the devil to pay. But if you go away at once by the front entrance into the yard, it might be supposed you only came to ask a question, and we may still save the situation."
She saw in this proposed move nothing but a crafty attempt at evasion, and a fresh volume of wrath overwhelmed her.
"I shall not go," she said, "till I hear what you've got to say for yourself;" and to give force to her resolve, she sank on to the creaking sofa, which was covered by a dirty, odoriferous grey horsecloth, folded several times to protect whoever sat down or lay on it from the projecting springs.
He was forced to yield. "Well, then, look here. A man is, so to speak, a man, isn't he? And when he is given up in a beastly mean sort of way he----"
"Mean way!" Lilly faltered. "What was there mean in my letter? Didn't I pour out my whole heart in it, and didn't dear Schwertfeger----?"
She could not go on, she was so choked with scorn and anger.
In the meantime he had arrived at the right policy to pursue, after being completely nonplussed at first.
"That's just it," he said, growing more offended every moment. "Can it be supposed that a love affair like ours was to close with a lukewarm moral sermon? ... and from that Schwertfeger woman too? Did I deserve it of you, to be dismissed through a third person that shabby, hideous old thing too? Wasn't it enough to drive a fellow desperate ... after all I have done for you?"
"Done for me?" echoed Lilly. "What have you done for me, pray?"
"Well, wasn't I always ready to be your self-sacrificing comrade? Haven't I even sacrificed my loyalty to my old colonel for your sake--the man I honoured and reverenced, who you may say picked me out of the gutter? That's no trifle, I can assure you. Do you imagine it didn't go against the grain? Do you imagine I didn't get awfully depressed? And then night after night to have nothing to do but fool round with a dog that stinks; for that beast Tommy does, you know. Can a man be blamed in the circumstance for trying to deaden his feelings, to still the qualms of his love-anguish? How you can expect that I shouldn't entirely amazes me. We speak different languages, my child, a yawning chasm divides our two natures. You actually don't mind risking both our lives for the sake of a petty grievance. I don't belong, as a rule, to the prudes; but the devil knows what I wouldn't give to get you out of this room."
During this lengthy oration he had walked round Lilly with one hand in the belt of his shooting-jacket, his short, jerky steps expressing his indignant consternation.
She for her part sat rigidly erect, turning her head, with great despairing eyes, towards him mechanically, first to the right, and then to the left.
When he had finished he took a new cigarette from a case and energetically brushed off the superfluous tobacco with his forefinger.
She rose to her full height, leaving the sofa and sofa-table a long way below her.
"Listen, Walter," she said; "from this moment all is at an end between us."
"Wasn't it so long ago?" he asked.
"I mean inwardly too," she explained.
"Oh, indeed ... inwardly!" He made a grimace. "That means, I suppose, in your case, when you are sick and tired of one."
When she saw her love so vulgarly derided and jeered at, her self-restraint completely collapsed. With a loud moan she ran behind the sofa and hid her face in the wall.
"Don't go near the window," she heard him hiss, as he ground his teeth.
But what did she care about the window?
In his distraught anxiety he took to pleading.
"Do come away from the window," he entreated. "I was only rotting. I wanted to make you laugh again; nothing else, I swear. Please come away from the window."
She did not stir. She wanted to crawl into something--crawl away with her shame.
Then she felt herself roughly seized by his hands.
So it had come to that, too! She was to be beaten by him!
She struck at him, wrestled with him, dug her fingers into his throat, and then suddenly ... A whizzing, clashing, and clattering, and splinters of glass flew over their heads; and an oblong, dark, slender thing glanced by them, like the shaft of a lance, hit something, rebounded, and lay at their feet.
At the same time she felt a gust of wind blow on her forehead and awaken her from the stupefaction of the moment.
One of the upper window-panes was shivered to atoms. But no sign of a living person was to be seen. Only the balcony door, which a minute or two had been shut, stood open, showing blackness within as it swung to.
"A near shave, by Jove!" said Walter, and stooped to pick up the mysterious weapon, the splintered panes of glass crashing beneath his feet.
"The pea-shooter!" faltered Lilly.
Yes, it was the pea-shooter that a quarter of an hour ago had stood on her balcony.
"It's a good job he hadn't his gun at hand," said Walter, "or we should be riddled now like sieves."
He wiped the anxious sweat that beaded his brow away with the back of his hand.
For all that he was a plucky little chap, and knew exactly what to do. He sprang to the wardrobe under which the foxy dog roosted, got out his military revolver, drew back the trigger, and tested the barrels.
Then he said: "Now, oblige me by going into Leichtweg's room. Bolt yourself in. He's simply gone to load, and then he'll be here."
But Lilly wouldn't. Her anger against him had completely evaporated.
"Let me stay with you. Please let me stay."
"It won't do, child," he said, wrinkling his forehead into the old masterful folds. "What is to follow now is man's business."
"Then I shall stay in the passage, and receive him at your door."
He gnawed his moustache. "Well, if you will take it like that, I can't reason with you," he said. "Please be seated."
He took the key from the outside of the door, put it in the lock on the inside and cautiously turned it several times.
"There's a vast difference between loading and shooting," he said, "the devil only knows."
Hereupon he drew out his watch, and listening attentively to every sound outside, he counted: one, one and a half--two minutes.
"It looks as if he couldn't find his cartridges," he said; and then, with a commanding air, he added, "Sit down; you will need your legs later."
She sank into one corner of the sofa and he took the other. He laid the watch between them on the bumpy seat. Both counted now with their eyes fixed on the minute-hand. "Two and a half--three, three and a half--four, four and a half--five minutes."
Nothing was to be heard but the wind whistling through the branches. Then it seemed as if they could hear horses' hoofs in the courtyard and a trotting away on the other side of the gates.
"Whom can he be going to fetch?" asked Walter. "It hasn't come to seconds yet."
Lilly saw red suns dancing before her eyes. The ceiling of the room began to descend on her.
And Walter went on counting: "Seven--eight, eight and a half." Still nothing. "Nine, nine and a half--ten----" Then he suddenly uttered a low whistling sound and seized his revolver.
The front door grated on its hinges, steps drew near, but not the threatening thunder of an outraged husband's, bent on revenge; these crept softly, catlike, hesitatingly onwards.
Then for a while silence again, only broken by the breathing of two anxious beings, and of someone else's breathing on the other side of the door.
"Who is there?" called out Walter.
Next came a tap, low, broken, unassertive, as if made by fingers that trembled and failed.
"Who the devil is there?" he shouted again.
"Anna von Schwertfeger."
He jumped up and opened the door.
There she stood, ashen-grey, and only red about the mouth and eyelids.
"The colonel has just driven to Baron von Platow's, and will be back in three hours. He has bidden me tell you, Lilly, that when he returns he does not wish to find you in his house or on his estate."
"And what has he bidden you tell me?" sneered Walter von Prell.
Fräulein von Schwertfeger, without heeding him, took Lilly's hand.
"Come," she said, "there's not much time. We must begin packing at once."
"Yes, but where am I to go?" she asked helplessly as she slowly rose to her feet.
Directly they were outside she saw the carriage that was to take her to the station drive up.