Lilly smiled. The porter gave her the address, and she drove out to Mrs. Jula.
In a little bosky corner where the poets and philosophers dwell, Lilly found a very sober little house, brimful of books and manuscripts and busts of eminent men.
Mrs. Jula seemed to have undergone a great change. She no longer wore her curly hair in a disorderly pompadour about her forehead, but smoothly parted and drawn down over her ears. This gave her a disquieting touch of virtuousness, although that way of wearing the hair was just then the height of fashion in the very world in which virtue for esthetic reasons has little value.
Though she came to meet Lilly, as always, with outstretched arms, her cordiality seemed not wholly genuine; and though she beamed with delight at seeing her friend again, her expression was somewhat distraught, as if she were holding much in reserve.
"Without asking Lilly about herself or paying any attention to her appearance, Mrs. Jula burst into an account of her own affairs.
"You'll be tremendously surprised, but I can't help it," she said. "I never kept my little scruples of conscience a secret from you—they were really superfluous—my sins had never been so dreadful—"
"Hm, hm," thought Lilly.
"So you shall be the first of our former circle—"
"Former?" thought Lilly.
"—to learn of my return to a decent existence. Well, not to beat about the bush, I'm going to get married."
"Your red-head?" asked Lilly, happy and sympathetic.
"Well, not exactly." Mrs. Jula regarded her finger-tips with a condescending smile. "My red-head has given me his blessings, but that ends his rôle."
"Then who is he?" asked Lilly, struggling to overcome her bewilderment.
Now Mrs. Jula hung back a bit after all.
"You see, it's a long story," she said hesitatingly. "To understand it thoroughly you'd have to know more of the circumstances of the past two years of my life. Did you ever happen to hear of an authoress by the name of Clarissa vom Winkle?"
Lilly recalled having seen the name in puritanic family sheets, which she had looked through in cafés and confectionery shops.
"Now listen: that Clarissa vom Winkle, who won a very acceptable reputation for championing the cause of simple, bourgeois morality as against the pernicious new-fashioned ideas of love—that Clarissa vom Winkle am I."
Lilly was too strongly under the spell of her own fate properly to appreciate the humour of Mrs. Jula's avowal. Just a glimmering suspicion dawned upon her mind of the monstrous farce we human beings figure in at life's bidding.
"Now on that account you're not to think me a convert or a bigot or something of the sort," Mrs. Jula continued with a certain little air of dignity, which became her as well as her quondam cordial cynicism. "There never was a special Day of Damascus in my life. I've always had, as it were, two souls in my breast; the one which—" she hesitated a moment—"well, which you know; and another which craves self-restraint and white damask and so on. That's the reason your unsuspicious loyalty always impressed me so, my dear. You probably recollect that I urged you to cling to your loyalty through thick and thin, because—you can't deny it—it's the crown of a woman's life. That's just what I said. Do you remember?"
Lilly was unable to recall such sentiments, but she did recall many others scarcely harmonising with them. She began to feel quite uneasy. Her friend's new conception of life seemed ill adapted for a source of peace to her in the joyful stress that had led her to seek sympathy with Mrs. Jula.
"Well, to continue," said the little lady. "I was always able to sell my essays and novels quickly, especially if I took them to the editors myself, and I found I was on the road to accumulating a tidy capital. My red-head became little more than an ornament. That's the beautiful thing about virtue. For the person who understands it, it is much more lucrative than sin." She ran her little red tongue over her lips in her knowing way, but maintained a perfectly demure face. "And then it was in disposing of my works that I met my husband to be. You know—I'm at last divorced from that old horror up there. This one is the editor of a new magazine for women. It stands for quiet domesticity and already has very good advertisements. He's a man of great intellectual gifts, and very firm moral principles, which, I suppose you've noticed, have not remained without influence on me."
She made a little double chin and folded her hands in her lap.
"And how did you manage to separate from—your old friend?" asked Lilly, from whose mind all these curious facts had almost driven her own concerns.
"Separate? What are you thinking of?" rejoined Mrs. Jula, beaming again with sunny foolishness. "I wouldn't be as heartless as all that. Even if I did say his rôle had ended, you're not to take it so literally. What's the poor dyspeptic fellow to do if I refuse to set a place for him at my table now and then? Why do you look so surprised, Lilly? Something of the sort can always be managed. In the first place, I swore to my betrothed that my red-head had never been more to me than a brotherly friend. All of us women swear such things and don't even blush."
Lilly nodded thoughtfully. That evening, had Konrad demanded it, she would have sworn an oath without a moment's hesitation.
"In the second place—I'm telling you this in confidence—he contributed a considerable sum toward establishing the magazine. So the two gentlemen are partners. I arranged matters that way intentionally, because it seemed to me the best guarantee of a continuance of all-around friendly relations. Don't make such large eyes, dearie. Life is made up of compromises. Every bird feathers its nest. And if you think I'm afraid of disclosures, I shrug my shoulders. Tragedy is a matter of taste.Idon't like it. So it doesn't exist for me. I always say to myself: you must wear a smile on your brow, but beneath the smile your brow must be of iron."
Lilly experienced a sickish sensation.
"If that's the price to pay for uprooting tragedy from one's life," she thought, "then I'd rather have unhappiness—I can swallow it—than all this happiness."
She rose.
No matter how high above her this woman towered in force of intellect and will, no matter how firmly she stood on the ground of virtuous life, she was no longer suited to be Lilly's friend.
"I sincerely hope you will never be mistaken in your confidence," said Lilly.
Mrs. Jula threw up her hand contemptuously.
"Bah," she said, "thosemen! A man who knows the world is a woman eater, and your 'pure' man is a simpleton. I can always get along with both classes."
"There may be a third class," said Lilly, irritated, as if Konrad had been insulted.
"Possibly," rejoined Mrs. Jula, shrugging her shoulders. "I've never come across it." Then putting both hands on Lilly's waist: "Tell me, child, perfectly frankly: if you look at me this way and compare me with what I used to be, does it seem to you that I'm posing?"
"To be quite candid," Lilly admitted, "it seemed to me so at first."
Mrs. Jula sighed.
"It's very hard to adapt your figure to a dress that wasn't made for you. Everybody has a certain moral ambition, the so-called non-moral person most of all. But there's one thing I'd love to know: what is really the more valuable in me, my former sinning or my present virtue."
She smiled up at Lilly with a melancholy yet sly expression.
This time Lilly did not respond. Beyond that complacent little scatterbrain her own happiness rose lofty and threatening as a storm-cloud.
When out on the street the feeling of restless isolation took stronger hold of her than ever. Yet she was glad she had not spoken. She knew that if she had held up her beloved's picture to Mrs. Jula's sly understanding, it would have come back to her desecrated.
Now there was actually not a soul to whom she could pour out her heart.
A few days later in glancing over the paper, as was her daily habit, her eyes were caught by a sentence which suddenly sent a ray of light into her soul: "St. Joseph's Chapel—Müllerstrasse—evening services," and so on.
Then her old, long-forgotten friend was still alive. He even possessed his own church here in cold, heretical Berlin.
In all the years she had been in Berlin she had not entered a church. After having seated herself among the Protestants at Miss von Schwertfeger's advice, she had felt she was a renegade, and had not ventured to seek solace in religion.
And now she was an atheist.
But the name St. Joseph in the paper warmed her heart. She felt as one who has wandered long in foreign lands and suddenly among a throng of strangers beholds a dear face from home.
Now she knew to whom to turn without fear of having to depart misunderstood and unheard. Even if the great scholars had done away with him a thousand times, he still existed for her stupid, surcharged heart, ready to receive the confession of her happiness.
Müllerstrasse was somewhere on the extreme north side, "somewhere around Franz-Josephs-Land," her green grocer, to whom she had applied, informed her.
She went through a maze of streets, from one electric tram to another—past the Reichtags buildings, the Lessing theatre, and the Stettin station—along the endless chaussé. Beyond the Weddingplatz, which the Berlinese consider the end of the world, was where Müllerstrasse began.
Nobody had the slightest notion of where a St. Joseph's chapel was, not even dwellers in the immediate vicinity. Finally somebody remembered seeing "a Catholic something or other," and Lilly at last found the object of her search.
A low frame structure which might have been taken for a barn, and some blossoming trees set between towering tenements.
The side door was open. Pine wreaths said "Welcome." Lilly saw a simple white hall permeated with the sepulchral smell of incense, laurel, and freshly cut pine, and in the background a niche decorated to resemble the starry heavens. Beyond the wooden balustrade separating the pictureless shrine of the high altar from the hall, rose two glorious palms. The low rumble of an organ came from the choir. The organist had probably stayed after the funeral to dream a bit.
In suspense Lilly's glance glided along the walls in search of her saint's abiding place. Was he smiling and holding up his finger here, too, with the same benevolent, threatening manner as the good old uncle in St. Anne's?
There was no place for side altars. The space was completely filled with benches. But that large picture there in the garish frame, with a console-table beneath covered with dusty bouquets—
She saw it—and started in terror.
Her saint, her dear, beloved saint, was simply ridiculous.
He had a sharp-nosed, wax-doll face with a golden yellow beard and eyes cast down in pious modesty, and he was smiling mawkishly. The infant Jesus clad in pink triumphed on his left arm, while his right arm gently clasped a spray of lilies.
Lilly's disgust turned into pity.
How remote, how inconceivably remote, was that world in which one implored St. Josephs for signs of favour.
Could it be that her good, true monitor in St. Anne's had been just as comical?
Perish the thought. He should not be, he must not be so absurd. There must beoneplace to which one's memory could travel homeward in hours of pleasant mourning.
The organ was playing the prelude of a beautiful mass by Scarlatti, which Lilly well knew from of old. Gradually she began to feel at ease.
She kneeled on the last bench, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine that instead of that blond caricature, her old friend was looking down upon her.
A saying of St. Thomas Aquinas occurred to her, which she remembered from her Sunday school lessons: "God has granted other saints the power to help us incertaincircumstances; to St. Joseph he has granted the power to help us whatever our need."
Once he had been so powerful in her life.
She spoke to him across the hundreds of miles and hundreds of years that separated her from the altar in St. Anne's—the last time on earth, she was fully aware. There was no longer place in her soul for such childishness. And just because it was her farewell, she told him without reserve of her great experience—how infinitely happy she now was—how everything that had lain dead within her blossomed forth with fresh life—and how the entire universe was one great symphony of joy.
And she told him of the monstrous deception she was practising, and her fear of discovery—and the sweet, impatient tremour for which there could be no image or name.
Then she told him she no longer believed in him in the least—she had become an "atheist."
Then, reconciled, she laid the carnations she had brought along for the poor out-of-the-way saint among the dusty bouquets and left with lightened heart, smiling at the spring which smiled upon her.
Beside this Lilly, whom the stormy wind of her new life bore aloft to the heavens far above all earthly hindrances, a second Lilly lived, who spent every other evening with her old friends, and was the marvel of her circle, because of her triumphant mood, her merry wit, the youthful liveliness of an awakening intellect.
When Richard came for his afternoon tea, he met with daily surprises. In place of the dragging gloom, which had long coloured her days, he found sprightliness and activity, a creature of novelties never still an instant. Though now and then abashed at his inability to keep pace with her, he gladly accustomed himself to this side of her being, and praised the magical qualities of the hæmatogen which the physician had prescribed that spring instead of the usual iron.
The same scene was enacted each evening that Richard wanted to take Lilly out. At first she pleaded a cold or said she was not in the mood for meeting people. But once she had consented and was in the swing, she played with her admirers as with puppies, and awed the ladies by telling them things to their faces. Sometimes, to be sure, she sat as formerly, absorbed in dreamy silence, though now, if anyone attempted to liven her up, she no longer blushed and suffered herself to be teased without an attempt at self-defence. She paid back every intruder with such prompt, haughty satire that the men soon found it wiser to leave her to herself.
In all this time she drank herself into a state of exaltation only once, and that on the day on which—at last!—she decided to tell Richard of the existence of her new friend.
She had wrestled with herself for two months. Sometime or other it had to be, she knew; for what if they were seen together! But since she could not decide in what form to clothe the avowal, she had deferred it from day to day.
Chance helped her out of the dilemma. One day Richard, in order to obtain her judgment, brought along some sketches of vases which had been submitted to him for purchase. On leaving he forgot to take them along. Konrad happened to see them, and in a few rapid strokes drew the outline which corresponded to the original draught, and which the artist in developing the plan had failed to insert.
The next day when Richard saw the work he looked at Lilly in astonishment. The corrections were splendid—who had made them?
Lilly, still suffering from the intimidation induced by her bungled work on the transparencies, did not dare to tell him she herself had. So taking heart she said:
"My teacher, who's giving me lessons in the history of art."
"Since when, I'd like to know?" asked Richard, his eyes growing round and severe.
In her great embarrassment she took to scolding as best—or as worst—she knew how.
"Do you think I can stand such a dull, inane, idle existence? Do you think it's a crime for an unoccupied young woman to strive for a bit of culture? Don't you think I'd be a better friend if I could keep pace with you and other clever people than if I go to my ruin jabbering a lot of nonsense and dressing myself up for show and behaving like any silly thing?"
The turn about "clever people" flattered him.
"All very well and good," he replied more mildly, "but why didn't you tell me before?"
She concocted a long story.
About three months before she had read an advertisement in theLokalanzeigerin which a young scholar offered his services to gentlemen and ladies possessed of a thirst for knowledge. She wrote to the scholar, he came, and the lessons began. Pupil and teacher had grown to be friends. Though their friendship, of course, was of a purely ideal nature, she dreaded awakening Richard's jealousy; so she had decided not to tell him until time should prove beyond the shadow of a doubt the absolute purity of her endeavours.
He wrinkled his forehead, and a cunning grin, inexplicable to Lilly, played about his mouth.
"So your friend's a young scholar?" he asked. His eyes twinkled, and he looked at her sidewise, his head inclined entirely to the left.
"Yes."
"He's going to bePrivatdozent, I suppose?"
"He's not quite certain, but he probably will."
"And I suppose he's highly intellectual and scintillating and superior?"
She turned her eyes heavenward.
"I've never in my life met a man who—" She stopped in fright. It was scarcely the better part of wisdom to give reins to her enthusiasm.
"Hm, hm," he said, as one who finds long harboured suspicions confirmed. His face was quite red, and he gnawed the ends of his moustache.
"I knew it!" cried Lilly. "You're jealous after all."
She felt as if a bitter injustice were being done her.
He said nothing more, and left lowering.
An hour later a package from Messrs. Liebert & Dehnicke was left at the door.
Lilly opened it and found it contained a man's suit, which she recognised as one Richard had frequently worn the previous summer.
A letter accompanied the package.
"Dearest Lilly:—As I promised you that time, I shall always be ready to come to the assistance of your affinities with old clothes. To further their progress I shall also be glad to provide them with old boots.You see how jealous I am.Your Richard."
"Dearest Lilly:—
As I promised you that time, I shall always be ready to come to the assistance of your affinities with old clothes. To further their progress I shall also be glad to provide them with old boots.
You see how jealous I am.
Your Richard."
In the exuberance of her delight Lilly drank to excess that evening. Never—not even when she had danced for Dr. Salmoni—had she allowed her imitative faculties such full play. She was in a state of mad self-abandon.
In conclusion she danced on the tops of the tables set close together, a wild Salome dance, which had just then come into fashion.
Between her clenched teeth she zimmed strange oriental melodies.
"What's that she's mumbling?" the spectators asked.
Later they put the question to her.
But she had lost her senses. She was unconscious.
The peaceful golden light of a Sunday morning in June pierced the railroad station's sooty glass roof.
Such an amount of blush brightness was gathered under the three great arches where they led into the open, that as the train glided beneath them you thought you were dipping into a sunny sea.
The gay ribbons of the dressed-up girls fluttered against the decent Sunday suits of the attentive youths, each of whom felt himself to be an indispensable master of ceremonies.
There were athletic clubs and rowing clubs and smoking clubs and singing societies, and an entire department store.
In the midst of the jolly, noisy throng a quiet, happy couple walked along looking about cautiously and keeping at a certain distance from each other, so that nobody could be sure whether or not they belonged together. They made for one of the front coaches.
Lilly walked ahead. Again she saw the faces of persons coming toward her grow rigid with a sort of solemn tenseness—a mute homage which she well knew, but which she had never accepted with so much joy as then, since the one man in the world whom she wanted to please was witnessing her triumph.
In his honour she had clad herself completely in festive white—a linen crash suit, an embroidered linen blouse, and a white straw hat with a white veil about it. She wore the hat low on her forehead, and beneath it her shining brown hair rolled in large waves. She carried a white zephyr shawl on her arm against the evening coolness, since they had arranged not to try to catch a certain train home, but remain in the country until they wearied.
They sat in opposite corners of the third-class compartment smiling slyly and saying not a word.
They were riding into the unknown.
"Follow me," he had said. "I'll give you a surprise. We will go on a voyage of discovery. I myself am by no means certain of my goal. Otherwise it wouldn't be a voyage of discovery."
The feeling of giving herself up without question was new and delicious.
About an hour must have passed and the compartment had long been empty, when he nodded to her to get out.
"Where are we?"
"What difference does it make where we are?"
Oh, he was right! Lilly never so much as glanced at the name of the station.
They walked along the uneven street of a bare little town. The sunshine lay on the yellow house fronts like a soporific. The shop doors were locked and sheets were stretched across the lower halves of the display windows to proclaim the Sunday.
Organ tones came from around the street corners like a dull breeze. A turkey cock strutted up from out of a gateway and gobbled at them—no more organ tones.
The houses grew less frequent. From the fields came a whiff of ripening grain, but the heavy fragrance of the yellow lupine overwhelmed it. Meadows of clover spread their white-dotted rugs, and in the background black firs rose from the summits of sand-coloured hills.
They stepped merrily along the unshaded road, on which little eddies of silvery white dust chased ahead of them.
Konrad knew and saw everything—how the falcon flapping its wings stood still in the air—how the wild rabbit lifting its little white rump leapt away in droll haste—every minute there was something new.
Since the days at Lischnitz Lilly had never walked out in the blossoming spring.
"Oh, if I had had a guide like him," she thought, "it would all have been so different."
In the pine woods, which gave out a hot breath, a squirrel ran past them almost over their feet, shot up a tree trunk, and at about a man's height from the ground stood still as if turned to stone.
Lilly and Konrad looked at each other mindful of the moment they had first met.
Lilly moved up to within a few feet of the squirrel, but it did not budge.
"I feel as if we were enchanted," she said. "If it were to speak to us, I shouldn't be a bit surprised."
Heaving a sigh of bliss she threw herself on the grey, crackling moss.
Konrad followed her example. Shading their eyes with their hands they lay on their backs and blinked up at the sun which flickered down on them through the sparse fir boughs.
They had both nearly forgotten the squirrel's presence, when a sudden chip sounded close over their heads. They looked up and saw the little fellow scampering up the trunk. Until that moment he had stared at them too frightened to stir.
"There you have it," said Konrad, "if we shoot our human language at them, they'll take good care not to speak to us."
"We're enchanted at any rate," laughed Lilly. "I at least have never in my life been stretched out so comfortably and had the sun shine on me so. Have you?"
"Oh yes," he rejoined. "I recall one time at least quite definitely."
"How? When?" Lilly inquired, all jealousy. She was jealous of every happy moment in his life which she had not created for him.
"Oh, there's not much to tell. It was in Ravello, a rocky nest not far from Amalfi, high over the sea. A perfect fairyland. Full of old, Moorish palaces, partly inhabited, partly in ruins. There are marble courtyards with trellised iron railings, ruined fountains with myrtle and laurel growing around in rank profusion and little white climbing roses covering everything. There was one place in particular which I would have given my life to be able to enter. It had a small, mysterious gallery which stood out against the deep blue sky like a silver web. An iron gate as high as a house separated me from that gallery. Since there was nobody about to see the street Arab escapade—only a few peasant labourers in the olive plantations live there—I actually climbed over that gate one day."
"Glorious!" cried Lilly.
"Yes, I got in. After making a professional inspection of the beautiful, strange motifs, I lay a long time on the warm stone steps, and let the sun shine down on me just as we are doing now under these Brandenburg firs. And—think of it! the little bluish-green lizards that you love so came gliding up slowly, cautiously, and ran straight over me."
"Oh, heavenly!" said Lilly rapturously.
"Lying there that way with the old marble fountain making music in my ears, I fell asleep—a thing one had better not indulge in, because one may get a sunstroke that way even in midwinter. I'm sure I should have, if some tourists hadn't come along and thrown sticks and stones at me. When I awoke I felt dizzy and I saw red. I couldn't dream of climbing over the gate again. The tourists had to fetch the gate key from the sindaco, and to cap the climax I had to appear before him for a hearing—Who are you? Don't you know trespassing in the garden is forbidden? But thank the Lord, he didn't send me to jail, because all the people tapped their heads and said: 'è matto, he's crazy.'"
"No harm," laughed Lilly. "You got what you wanted; you entered the forbidden garden. Other people have to be content with standing outside the railing."
"A pleasure we shall probably enjoy to-day," he observed, and Lilly choked down her curiosity.
"At any rate," he continued, "it doesn't hurt if one practices standing outside now and then. Heaven knows, the very happiness toward which you crane your neck usually is a forbidden garden."
Lilly looked at him.
What did he mean by that?
Their eyes met in shy understanding.
That hopeful disquiet, which she did not venture to call by its name, quivered through her like a fit of fever.
"Come," she said, jumping to her feet and hurrying on without looking back at him.
The woods grew thinner. They now walked along a thicketed swamp where birches gaily shot up their slender white columns from mossy pediments.
The warm noon air vibrated in wavelets. From somewhere came the sound of a church bell, but no farmyard was visible far or near, and suddenly they struck a cross-road, and did not know which way to go.
"We are called upon to decide," he said, and listened a while in the direction from which the sound of the bell came. Then he turned to the right.
"I wish," he went on, "I wish there were a bell to sound the way for me in life."
Then he told her he was standing at a cross-road. He had been offered a position, which in view of his youth was not of slight importance. But before accepting it, he had to make sure whether at the same time he could continue with his life-work.
"It must be a very high position, isn't it?" Lilly asked proudly. Had the world felt impelled to make him Minister of Fine Arts, or Emperor of China, she would not have been a bit surprised.
But he hesitated to reply, and finally said:
"I'd rather tell you about it when it's all settled."
She had to be content.
Roofs gleaming red crept over the tops of the bushes. On the edge of the horizon sparkled a lake, nothing more at that distance than a fine silver thread.
"Is that it?" asked Lilly.
"Possibly."
"Oh, don't put on such a mysterious air," she rebuked him teasingly. "Up to now I've been very good and haven't asked a single question. But do at last tell what you have up your sleeve."
"Afterwards, when we're there," he laughed. "I know you. I shouldn't like to make you jealous before the time's ripe."
Oh, if a womanwasin the case!
Another woman!
She gave no outer signs of her emotion, but as she walked along she felt quite ill, partly from hunger, partly from distress.
The lake in its light blue summer beauty now lay before them with its greyish-green girdle of reeds and its glistening play of light.
Not far from the bank, on an eminence encircled with bushes, stood an inn, a reddish-yellow atrocity, built in that barbarous style for frame houses half-way between a palace and a barn.
But three or four wide-spreading ancient lindens surrounded the inn, and the white benches beneath offered pleasant seats according with Lilly's and Konrad's mood.
To the left the lake stretched into the hazy distance; to the right, beyond the reeds, in the cove, lay a peasant village, with its mossy green thatched roofs and its blunt, weather-beaten spire half hidden in the bushes and reeds.
And nearby, only a few hundred feet away, rose the mighty trees of a park, from the interior of which here and there came a gleam of columns and bridges and white, vine-clad walls.
Probably the "forbidden garden," in front of whose railing she was to stand that day.
How beautiful and how mysterious.
Anglers came up from the lake, red as lobsters and panting with thirst, the sole guests, it seemed, besides Lilly and Konrad. The stream of Sunday excursionists had not yet flowed into that quiet corner.
But the bill of fare offered a dizzying abundance of good things—too bad they had come all at once. The landlady who handed them the card with smiling obsequiousness, was an artful city product.
Konrad wanted Lilly to arrange the menu, but she refused. The thought of the woman in the case oppressed her sorely, and, as through a dark veil, she looked on the laughing world, which willingly threw its early summer treasures at their feet.
"At last we're here," she said sighing. "Now do confess: what sort of a woman is she?"
He burst out laughing.
"So you know there's a woman in the case?"
"What else would make me jealous?"
"She has the right to make you jealous, I must say, I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life. It's a pity she's of marble."
Oh, if that was all.
"I am and always will be a goose," laughed Lilly, and he kissed her hand in apology.
While awaiting the fish they had ordered, he told her the history that led up to their present pilgrimage.
In Rome he had once noticed an antique bust of a woman in an art dealer's show window. The head was badly mutilated, but of such lofty sombre beauty that he kept returning to the window to feast his eyes upon it. One day he found the dealer and a German gentleman engaged in an eager conversation, which, however, never progressed, because the two did not understand each other. He offered his services as interpreter, and to his dismay learned that his beloved was being bargained for. The German was a baron, courteous and evidently a man of some culture. In defiance of his own feelings Konrad tried his best to arrange the sale, and for his pains received an invitation to view the bust in the baron's park—he was to convince himself that the beautiful head was destined for no unworthy setting.
"Why, then, it's not a forbidden garden after all," cried Lilly, blissfully stretching her arms toward the mysterious green walls. "We have the right to enter it."
But Konrad looked thoughtful.
"It's not so simple as all that. Remember—as what shall I introduce you? You're not my wife. I can't say you're my sister, as you and I pretend, and we're both too young for any other relationship."
A sudden bitterness welled up within her. Again she felt scorned, outlawed, expelled from the community of the virtuous.
"You should have left me at home," she burst out. "I'm nothing but a burden to you."
"Oh, Lilly," he said, "what do I care for all the marble women in the world! I'd rather stand outside with you than be shown the honours of the entire place."
Reconciled and grateful, she stroked his hand hanging at his side.
At this point—at last! the carp was served.
Two hours later they were walking along an endless wall about nine feet high with never a break in it to peep through.
But at the corner of the park to the right the wall came to an end giving place to a high mossy wooden fence, which allowed them a view some distance into the interior.
Ancient plane trees arched over shady nooks with lindens and elms forcing themselves between. Large-leafed vines with great violet eyes draped the open grassy places. In the background on a hillock about which towered sombre spruces stood a small, solemn round temple with Tuscan columns and a gleaming green roof.
"She must be in there," said Konrad. But the temple was empty.
So they continued their search. Not a single opening in the foliage escaped them. Here something gleamed and there and there—a Ceres, a satyr blowing his pipe of Pan. In a cypress thicket they caught a glimpse of a wayside shrine of Our Lady, but the woman's head they were seeking was nowhere to be seen.
They walked on. A stream flowing from within the park crossed the road. An unsightly plank bridge, such as is to be seen on every highway, led across.
But a few hundred feet away, inside the park, another bridge boldly yet gracefully threw its shining white arch over the running water.
"The bridges in Venice look like that," he said.
"That is the way the gods went to Walhalla," she said.
With a sigh they stopped and pictured the delights of crossing that bridge.
Still nothing to be seen of their marble bust.
Beyond the plank bridge, where the village began, the park receded some distance from the road. A row of tall serious Weymouth pines ran along the other side of the fence.
The village street was gay with Sunday life. The sound of a piano and a fiddle came from a dancing hall, interrupted every now and then by the roll of bowling balls.
Lilly and her friend passed without giving heed to these things. Their wishes were still fastened upon the forbidden garden. Each moment increased their longing.
Hidden between the village lindens crouched crumbling stone posts to which the decaying fence pales clung with difficulty.
Here the foliage in the interior was impenetrable to the eye. Ivy and clematis serpentined from trunk to trunk, and lilacs and spiræas grew in rank profusion between.
The lord of the garden seemed to have drawn an inner living hedge about himself and his companions to conceal them in laughing seclusion.
Once more they walked along in vain endeavouring to get a peep into the interior.
Presently they came upon an ancient, three-winged gate, which with its vases and columns, its cracked belfry, and its wrought-iron lace work, was half sunk in blooming acacias.
Here at last they could get a good view of the park.
In sombre solemnity tall pines led straight to the castle. But even here they were unable to obtain a glimpse of the buildings, which probably stood off to one side hidden behind trees and bushes. The only architectural bit their searching eyes discerned was a columned terrace, where cherubs fluttered their snowy white wings.
"Oh, how beautiful!" sighed Lilly, and pressing her face between the iron bars she jestingly whined and begged to be let in.
"That's just the way I stood outside the gate in Ravello. Now you know what it's like."
His words brought to Lilly the realisation that she had long known what "it was like." She was familiar with the feeling. She had often stood in the very same position.
But where, where?
Where had cold iron pressed her cheeks just as now?
Oh, yes. Many and many a time she had stood at the iron grating of the door leading to Mrs. Dehnicke's staircase, that proud, laurel-shaded staircase which her desecrated feet were never to tread.
That, too, was a forbidden garden!
Forbidden gardens everywhere!
"Shouldn't we go?" she asked softly. "It will simply depress us to remain here."
Hand in hand they returned the entire distance they had come, keeping as close as possible to the enclosure and speaking of anything but their hearts' desire.
Nevertheless, their eyes remained fastened on the goal of their aspirations; and the yearning they both felt, though neither of them would express it for fear of hinting reproaches, threw a fairy film of gold over the universe.
Evening came.
Violet shadows lay upon the meadows, the coppery pine trunks glowed like torches. As the sinking sun dipped into the reeds, the lake lost its cool blue silvery sheen and adorned itself with a net of reddish gold. It looked as if it had sportively drawn to itself the fulfilment of all earthly promises.
The two could no longer bear it on land.
Down at the bathing pavilion, where a merry lot of people were splashing about in the evening coolness, there was a boat to be hired for very little.
Konrad took the oars and Lilly seated herself at the tiller.
Water plants plashed lightly against the sides of the boat, and the bow cut through a waving carpet of pollen.
Among this year's tender green reeds stood the yellowish-grey weather-beaten remnants of last year's growth. Dark bulrushes edged the shores, and the water-flag planted its golden tents between.
Over the reeds and bulrushes they could see the massed park trees rising toward the heavens like purple walls.
When Lilly told him to look there, he observed indifferently:
"Oh, no use, it's out of the question."
Nevertheless he continued to cast sidelong glances that way.
Lilly in her slight experience with boats did not know how to manage the tiller, and after trying a while she threw the rope down and spread her white shawl on the bottom of the boat to make a cosy nest for herself.
She lay crouched at Konrad's feet with her back to the seat in the stern, and with her eyes lost in the blue depths she began to plan a different future, some way of saving herself by a desperate leap into the land of the virtuous.
She would give music lessons—her knowledge sufficed for beginners—and with her savings prepare for the stage, for which her talents eminently fitted her—or, better still, take up scientific studies, because she must keep intellectual pace with him. She must be a suitable friend so long as he needed her friendship.
Or—not to wound the sensibilities of others—she would leave Germany, earn her living as a teacher of German, and when he should summon her, return a new, purified being.
Or—oh dear, "or!"
To lie and dream and drink the cup of her present joy to the dregs. Discovery and death—the one involved the other—would come soon enough.
The sun dissolved behind a blood-red curtain. Violet vapours closed down, enveloping things far and near. The entire world seemed to have thinned into light and air. The reeds alone, with their slender black stalks standing out against the evening glow like a dainty railing of wrought iron, retained their corporeal aspect.
The foliage of the park slowly melted into a mass of darkness.
Now the park seemed to be doubly a forbidden garden, filled to the brim with thrills and mysteries, sunk forever in the realm of the unattainable.
As the boat glided slowly along the edge of the reeds a blue cove suddenly opened up, making a wedge-shaped cut into the land on the park side. It seemed to continue inward without end.
For a few moments Konrad remained motionless, his oars suspended. Then he jumped to his feet with an exclamation of joy.
"What's the matter? What's the matter?"
"You remember the stream flowing out on the other side of the park?"
"Certainly."
"It must have flowed in somewhere—eh?"
"Of course."
He pointed to the gleaming tip of the cove.
"There it is."
"You think we shall after all—?"
The thought was too bold for utterance.
"Now, by water, in this boat, we shall cross that whole dark region from one side to the other."
In her rapture she jumped up with a little outcry of delight, and fell upon his neck, naturally, as if they had never exchanged vows and pledges.
The boat gradually slipped into the current and floated between meadows set with willows where the evening mist lay like white swathes. Beyond stood gleaming peasant huts; and fishing nets draped the fences.
Then, at a bend in the stream, a mighty arch of foliage opened up before them.
"O Lord!" cried Lilly.
"Psst! We must keep very quiet now," he said, "else we'll be turned out after all."
He dipped his oars so lightly that the sound might have been taken for the splash of a leaping fish.
He rowed through the gate of leaves under branches joined overhead in a mazy thicket. It was dark as night in this spot, though here and there on the right a gleam of the summer twilight pierced through the foliage.
They also caught a glimpse of lights and heard talk and laughter and the sound of clinking glasses and, intermittently, a chord, as if someone in the midst of conversation carelessly ran his hand over the keys.
Here the trees and bushes were wider apart, and they had an unobstructed view of the castle—a broad, two-storey building. Its ponderous simplicity pointed to the time when the grandees of Brandenburg had not yet possessed a feeling for art. But on the terrace were the cherubs who had greeted them from a distance in the afternoon.
Between their white bodies at a long table in the flickering lamplight sat a chattering, laughing, singing company, apparently drinking in the intoxication of the summer evening with their wine.
"He, too, might be sitting there, if I weren't a mill-stone about his neck," thought Lilly, and she felt as if she ought to beg his pardon.
The current carried the boat on. The banquet scene vanished like the vision of a moment.
Passing that end of the castle in which the kitchen and pantries lay, where ministering spirits ran busily to and fro, they dipped once more into silence and darkness.
To the right of them back of the many-windowed edifice, was a lawn with old statues and ivy-draped urns—to the left a world buried in darkness. A line of lindens, hundreds of years old, bordered the stream and stifled every ray of light in its dark halls.
Perhaps this was where the marble bust was hidden. Lilly peered into every recess, though furtively, so as to reserve the pleasure of discovery for him.
They now approached the daintily arched bridge they had seen from afar in the daytime.
It did not lead to Walhalla, but from a spiræa bush to a hemp bush, and beneath it slept a pair of swans, who awoke at the stroke of the oars and with outspread wings swam behind the boat begging for bread.
"Swans! The one thing lacking!" Lilly rejoiced softly, and sought in vain for a crumb. She turned to look after the swans and her neck touched his knees.
"May I stay this way?" she asked a little anxiously.
"If you're comfortable," he answered. There was a yielding tone in his voice which ran warm through her body.
She unpinned her hat, and laid it on the back seat. Now she was free to lean her head lightly against him. With sweet alarm she felt his hand quietly stroke her head.
But he seemed taciturn and self-absorbed, as if a burden were weighing upon him which he was not strong enough to shoulder.
And again she felt, as ofttimes, that a veil hung between them, a veil seldom lifted aside, which obscured the true features of his being, no matter how closely her love drew her to him.
"Oh, if only he were gay!"
The park came to an end.
The red evening glow, no longer shadowed by a mass of foliage, shone upon them insistently. The magic spell threatened to be broken. The world took on its ordinary aspect.
"Come, turn," she asked softly.
He rowed back again into the blissful night.
Now he had to strive against the current, and could not avoid the sound of splashing.
"If only they don't catch us," he said.
"Oh, they are too happy," rejoined Lilly, "they wouldn't do anything to a happy person."
"It seems almost like an enchanted castle, but who can tell—it may be a delusion."
"Why?"
"Oh, the most grievous wound may be hidden under powers, and many a man hides himself behind beauty because he has buried his powers."
The doubt displeased Lilly.
"But they should be happy," she exclaimed softly. "Those who can spare so much as they have given us to-day have enough left for themselves."
"Illogical conclusion, darling," he replied. "You can enrich a beggar and still remain as poor as a church-mouse."
"Arewebeggars?" she asked, raising herself up to him tenderly.
"No, by God, we arenotbeggars," he replied drawing a deep breath.
There was silence for a time. Then it seemed to Lilly something warm and moist fell upon her forehead.
For God's sake! He was crying! Crying with happiness. How had she deserved it—she, Lilly Czepanek—she—?
To hide her own tears she crouched down again. It was in overflowing measure—unendurable. She wanted to sob, cry aloud, kiss his hands. Yet she was forced to clench her fists and stuff her gloves between her teeth, to keep him from seeing what was going on within her. It was a God-send that as they slowly approached the castle again, the sound of a woman's singing reached them. Full ringing tones, which in the ascending notes struck her heart like a lash.
What was she singing? Wasn't it from Tristan? Lilly had never heard the opera, but it could only be from Tristan.
She raised her head questioningly.
"Isolde'sLiebestod," Konrad whispered in her ear.
He turned the boat toward the shore in the deepest darkness. They must not lose a note.
Up there on the terrace the laughing and talking had ceased. The nightingale alone, in the linden thicket, would not be silenced, and mingled its sweet ecstasy with the exultation in death of the woman who like no other creation of God or man teaches us that the desire not to be is the most exalted affirmation of to be.
Lilly, her whole body quivering, put her hand over her shoulder to grasp his. She had to hold on to him. Otherwise she felt she would sink into the void. She did not grow easier until she felt his warm fingers between hers.
The song ended. The mighty arpeggios of the accompaniment died away. There was no applause. Each of the merry guests had realised his indebtedness to the occasion.
Konrad pressed her hand and withdrew his, and took up the oars again.
The forbidden garden began to disappear.
The reddish dusk of night lay upon the meadows. Not sound far or near. Nevertheless the world seemed filled with the music of harps and ringing songs.
"We haven'tseenyour marble woman," Lilly whispered, stroking his knees, "but I keep thinking that was her voice."
"I, too," he burst out passionately. "And she wasn't singing for the good folk up there, but just for us."
"Oh, if only I could sing it like her," sighed Lilly.
"Try."
She remembered bits here and there, but was unable to gather them into a whole. Besides something else forced its way between, which now gushed up mightier than all else.
With the Song of Songs of the greatest and richest her own poor Song of Songs mingled, undesired, uncalled.
And she sang into the deep silence: