The Song Of Songs Part 109

Sometimes while staring at him, she thought:

"If I were to kill him now, run a hat pin through his heart or something of the sort, he would belong to me, to me alone, forever."

Then she would hollow her hand and place it on the left side of his breast and fancy she held his heart and with his heart his love, which she need never more give up.

Once while she bent over him, he awoke with a start.

"What's the matter? Did I do anything to you?" he asked.

"Why?"

"Your expression is so strange, almost as if you were angry with me."

She resolved not to stare at him any more. But she could not resist; she loved him too dearly.

It was horrible when dread seized her that she might lose him. Many a night it attacked her with such awful force that she felt like screaming and raving and tearing her hair. But it would be wrong to rouse him. So she gently laid her head under his shoulder, one arm under his back, the other across his breast, and pressing close against him told herself she had grown into one with him.

Then gradually she grew calmer and could find comfort in tears, or in picturing to herself how happy she would make him, unspeakably happy.

She would envelop him in a mantle of love, so soft and thick as to prevent fate's rude blows from reaching him. She would be his muse, would wear an invisible aureole about her head, enkindle the desire within him for a thousand great deeds; she would give him the devoted care of a Sister of Mercy, would learn to cook and make her own dresses.

No--rather attend scientific courses at the university, and study music.

Oh, she would do many more things, that he should never weary of her.

For all this, of course, she would first have to be free, with relations between her and Richard entirely broken off.

She often thought of Richard also, but without a shadow of blame. She had long forgiven him for having led her to the brink of the abyss.

"Each person acts according to the law of his own being," Konrad had said.

Besides, Richard had once been her saviour.

So far as the outer world was concerned, the new life was to begin as soon as Richard announced his engagement. He had written that his suit was progressing, and by right her free life with Konrad ought already to have commenced, but Lilly did not feel equal to a crisis. She shuddered at all the lies she would continually have to dish up to Konrad, once a change took place in her household.

She avoided facing the poverty that was bound to come. It was only at night when she had worked herself into a joyous ecstasy on the sleeping man's breast, and her future with him stretched before her in gold and purple, that privation seemed to her the very sum and substance of happiness and plenitude.

At three o'clock in the morning, when the street lamps went out one by one, and the grey of dawn came creeping over the ceiling, Lilly would have to awaken him.

He must not meet any of the tenants of the house. She owed it to his and her own reputation.

While dressing he groped about, drunk with sleep, among Lilly's ivory toilet articles, still resplendent with the seven-pointed coronet, and managed to get himself into shape for a stimulating cup of black coffee at the nearest Vienna cafe.

For he felt that from Lilly's bed he must go to his desk with all possible speed.

He could not be dissuaded from this madness.

The pa.s.sionate hours of the night demanded atonement; an idea to which he clung tenaciously, no matter that he spent the early morning hours in vain, wearisome brooding over his papers.

Lilly, on the other hand, fell into a deep sleep, from which Adele roused her at about ten o'clock, when she brought in the breakfast tray, smiling contentedly.

Lilly let Konrad have every other night for himself.

She did not want to suck his lifeblood away. Even so he gave her sufficient cause for worry. His colour was bad, his eyes vacillated, his mood varied abruptly from violent gaiety to vacant-eyed self-absorption.

All that would surely be different when once--what?

To think of nothing, to plan nothing, to wish for nothing. Just to love him and know he was happy.

She spent her days dreaming both pleasant and tremulous dreams. Her intense fervour for mental occupation had departed. Besides, all sorts of new and important things intervened to distract her; especially the need to please him, to hand him daily the draft that intoxicated him and kept him her own.

Hitherto she had taken the beauty of her body as a matter of course, and had paid as little regard to it as to a hidden and useless object. Now she felt she must constantly take thought of the ideal he treasured in his mind, must try to resemble it--she well knew that in reality she approached it a little only when drunken bliss exalted her above herself and the stale and unprofitable flats of her life.

Thus arose an eager cult of her flesh, something she had always despised.

She took care of her body like a woman in a harem, perfumed her baths, manicured her toe nails, lengthened her eyebrows, and powdered her arms and shoulders. Every day she discovered new blemishes, which discouraged her and for which she sought new remedies.

At the same time she was ever haunted by the fear that through sheer attention to her toilet she would acquire the look of a beautiful prost.i.tute. So she locked away her jewellery and dressed very simply.

None but the connoisseur could discern how much artistic care had gone into the creation of this faultless simplicity.

When she was alone what troubled her most was jealousy. Not that she suspected him of relations with another woman. He stood too high in her estimation for that. But she was jealous of everything he did. The thought of his desk fairly tortured her. Each hour he spent away from her seemed traitorous to her love, and she thought of his friends with a hostility of which she had never deemed herself capable.

On the evenings she was left alone, she held watch over his room from the opposite side of the street, where she stood pressed in a doorway exactly as formerly in Alte Jakobstra.s.se.

When his lamp was lighted she was satisfied, but when she saw him come or go at a late hour, she did not sleep the whole night.

He lived a short distance from her in a third-storey room. It was long before he permitted her to call on him.

In the room next to his, he explained, lay a sick woman who had to be kept from the slightest excitement. The sound of a strange voice might aggravate her condition.

While telling this to Lilly he strangely avoided her eyes and she felt that a hundred chances to one he was keeping something from her. But when upon her insistence he admitted her to his room one afternoon she found nothing to confirm her suspicions. She merely had to speak very low; which she had known beforehand.

His room was just an ordinary student's room. It had two windows, a high ceiling, cheap furniture, and no couch and no carpet. But valuable engravings adorned the walls, and the customary pier-gla.s.s was hidden behind an old copy of the Madonna di Foligno, who looked down in serene loftiness upon the poverty of northern philistinism. There were long low bookcases full of books; and more books, for which there was no room on the shelves were piled up high in the corners, protected against dust by pieces of crushed oil-cloth, such as pedlars use for wrapping about their wares.

As was to be expected, the desk was the only article that displayed a certain luxuriousness. Like the pictures, it was Konrad's own property.

With its n.o.ble carving and broad top, it stood in the centre of the room, solemn as an altar.

Not one woman's picture to be seen on it. Lilly had not given him hers, and evidently others were not deemed worthy of the place of honour.

There was only one photograph, that of an old gentleman, framed with gla.s.s, which stood back of the blotting pad and the ink well. A weather-beaten, epicurean face, with fine snow-white hair, and shrewd eyes beneath half-sunken lids, eyes peculiar to old connoisseurs of women.

It was the picture of the uncle who had paid for Konrad's education and supported him.

Lilly felt a dull oppression, as if those eyes were looking her through and through, and needed but a glance to unveil the great secret that she concealed from her lover with a thousand subterfuges.

"I'll be careful never to meet him," she thought.

Konrad took from a drawer his precious treasure, the preliminary work on his great history of human emotions, and showed Lilly the reams of paper closely covered with writing.

This work was his real love, and she, Lilly Czepanek, was nothing but a dark, bloodless shadow, which greedily glided through his nights.