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.