The Song Of Songs Part 26

"And the libretto, I swear."

He handed her the roll, and she gave herself up to him--sold herself to the man who already possessed her for the Song of Songs, of which he had robbed her.

The rays of early morning shining on her eyes through curtains striped with yellow awoke her. She was resting comfortably pressed against something warm. She had slept deliciously.

What had happened to her came back to her slowly.

She leaned over and wanted to kiss him.

He was lying with his head thrown back, his mouth open. The light from the windows was playing on his shiny, furrowed chin. Little veins crisscrossed his gaunt cheeks like streams on a map. The inky moustache glistened with pomade. His eyelids were folded over so often that Lilly thought if they were stretched to their length they would reach to the tip of his nose.

"He doesn't look bad," she said to herself, but the idea of kissing him pa.s.sed out of her mind.

She got up without making a sound, and all the time she dressed he did not stir. The old cavalry man was blessed with sound sleep.

She wrote on a sheet of hotel paper, "have gone to church," laid the sheet between his fingers, and slipped out, down the steps and past the porter, who was so astonished he forgot to pull off his cap.

The streets of the little town were dreaming in the quiet of the winter morning. Hillocks of snow swept from the middle of the street were heaped in rows along the gutters. A black swarm of crows squatted in a circle about the frozen fountain in the market-place. The faint sound of sleigh bells penetrated the grey air.

Boys carrying bags were wending their way to school. In some of the sorry shops lights were still burning. Apprentices with ruddy cheeks sweeping the steps stopped at Lilly's approach, and stared, or called to others inside; whereat more youths appeared and all, as if moved by one spring, goggled after her.

Marching steps beat a tattoo behind her. A long line of infantry wearing gloves--but no overcoats--came tramping along the middle of the street, puffing clouds of frozen breath in front of them at regular intervals.

All turned "eyes left" toward her, as if that had been the word of command, and the officers walking at the side of the line threw one another questioning glances, and shrugged their shoulders.

She did not have far to search for the Catholic parish church, which towered above the roofs round about. It was a clumsy stone structure with remnants of Gothic built over and stopped up with bricks.

The alcoves along the side aisles were filled with altars barbarously gilded and decorated with cheap garish vases. Her St. Joseph was nowhere to be found. So she contented herself with Our Lady of Sorrows, who, however, did not have much to say to her.

An inexplicable feeling of oppression and emptiness seized her, as if she had broken something, she did not know what.

She kneeled and mumbled her prayers so unthinkingly that she was ashamed of herself.

Then she caught herself ogling her kid gloves which enveloped her fingers with velvety, inconspicuous aristocracy.

Every now and then a shiver ran through her body, which forced her to close her eyes and clench her teeth--she was ashamed of the shiver, too.

Soon she gave up praying entirely, and regarded Our Lady, who was pulling a doleful face, as if to say: "Do, please, draw this thing out of my body." Yet the seven swords piercing her heart had handles set with pearls and precious gems.

"If only I were unhappy," thought Lilly, "I'd have _something_. Then I could carry on a conversation with her, the way I used to with St.

Joseph--and the swords in _my_ heart would be sumptuous to behold."

As sumptuous as the pearl chain he had put about her neck yesterday at the wedding.

She recalled what she had been like two months before, when she had stolen off for half an hour in the grey of early morning to lay her hot, surcharged heart at the feet of her beloved saint--how she had been borne off on clouds by the intoxication of youth, her gaze turned upon the fair and blessed distance.

None the less she had been steeped in misery and utter dest.i.tution.

"If that's the way happiness looks," she went on with her thoughts, and shrugged her shoulders.

Suddenly she was beset with fear that those times would never return, that she would have to live on eternally as now, empty-hearted, distraught, tortured by a dull oppression.

"This comes of not loving him enough," she confessed to herself.

At last she knew what she had to pray for to Our Lady of Sorrows.

She hid her face in both hands, and prayed long and fervently. She prayed to be able to love him--with as much pa.s.sion as she had drops of blood--with as much devotion as she had hopes in her soul, with as much delight as there was laughter in her heart.

And behold! Her prayer was heard!

With the burden removed from her soul, her eyes shining, she arose, and returned to the place where she belonged, to serve him in humility and trust--as his child, his handmaiden, his courtesan, whichever he happened to wish.

CHAPTER XIV

The colonel wishing, on account of his mesalliance, to avoid his many military friends, did not stop over at Berlin with Lilly, but went directly on to Dresden, which they reached in three hours.

He had engaged rooms at Sendig's, and the proprietor had done his utmost to fit up snug and aristocratic quarters for the newly-wed couple.

Sitting-room, bedroom, and bath--that was all they needed. Close companionship, the outer appearance of intimacy, would naturally bring about inward intimacy.

The colonel had good cause, indeed, to be satisfied with his honeymoon!

He, who in the course of his many amours had probably dandled hundreds of girls on his knees, who thought he knew women through and through, the tart and the sweet, the chaste and the coquette, the sensitive and the bold, the genuine and the flashy, those who confined their coy caresses to a man's hand and lower arm, and those who hung on men's lips biting and sucking them in a wild frenzy, he, the old voluptuary, to whom nothing feminine ought to have been strange, stood astounded, incredulous before this lovely marvel.

So much abandon and so much pride, so much tenderness and so much fire, so much ready comprehension and so much artless childishness, all mingled in one dreamy, laughing Madonna head, had never before presented itself to him, for all the fine art he had exercised in his roue's career.

What touched him most and completely puzzled him was the modesty of her desires, the fact that she made no demands of any sort.

When they took dinner _a la carte_ he might be sure her eye would travel to the cheapest orders for herself; and the expression with which she would sometimes prefer a request to be allowed to drink orangeade, was as hesitating and shamefaced as if she were making a love avowal.

One day, on returning from the Grosser Garten by way of side streets, Lilly stood still in front of a poverty-stricken little provision shop.

As a rule nothing could induce her to look into shop windows, and the colonel, curious as to her interest in the place, extracted from her the confession that she loved sunflower seeds--and would he be very angry if she asked him to buy some?

The more he overwhelmed her with gifts, the less she seemed to realise that money was being spent for her sake.

The long dearth she had suffered prevented her from appreciating the value of money, and whatever he put into her purse she handed out again without hesitation to the first beggar she met on the street. Then again it smote her conscience when he gave a flower girl two marks for a rose.

Once, upon her doing one of these incredible things, which usually sent the colonel into epicurean transports, he was seized with sudden distrust.

"I say, little girl," he said, "are you an actress?"

Lilly did not even understand him. She looked at him with the great, sad eyes of innocence she always made on such occasions, and said:

"What are you thinking of! Since papa left I haven't even _seen_ an actress. I haven't been inside a theatre once."