I am writing to him by this mail. Step boldly in among his lamps and vases. The former, I hope, will brighten your nights, the latter, daintily line your way in life, and he will not ask the price which it is the custom in our country to demand of beautiful women. Some queer fish there have to be in the world.
My address will be
Walter von Prell, Street-lounger & Candidate for Fortune, Chicago, First Stockyard to the Left.
P. S.--Tommy sends his regards. Before going I planted a ball in his forehead."
This letter, the last and only greeting from her friend, left Lilly untouched. Soon after, Miss von Schwertfeger wrote, he set sail for the United States with a crippled arm. Their love had deserved an honourable burial, even if its rapture had not been genuine, even if its lofty purpose had set in dirt and disgrace.
"If only to preserve our souls for each other," he had written, the dear little fellow.
The letter, however, offered a certain guarantee that in her hour of need, a helping hand would be stretched out to steady her. But the measure he recommended, she never, never thought of adopting. What she feared above all was that something which emanated from the eyes of men fixed upon her face in desire, that something which issued from men"s lips persuasively, masterfully.
She wanted to keep her fate in her own hands and go her own way.
What that way was to be, she had not yet determined.
So irresolute had sorrow and anxiety made her that nothing but a faint breeze would have been required to head her life in a certain direction.
But no breeze blew upon her.
Months pa.s.sed. Miss von Schwertfeger ceased to write. Lilly"s money gave out. The little treasure of trinkets dwindled rapidly.
The lodging houses to which she moved grew ever more modest. Chilian attaches and Greek trafficers were replaced by bankrupt real estate agents and unemployed bank clerks, who wanted to solace her in her loneliness by spending the evenings with her. And the women who came in soiled kimonos to pay her neighbourly visits cast greedy glances at the few brooches, bracelets and rings she still had left.
So Lilly determined to make an end of this life.
CHAPTER II
One of the best of the "best rooms" in Berlin which are to be found in houses having once known those renowned better days and which are let out to decent young women for thirty marks, including service and breakfast, was to be had from the widow Clothilde Laue.
It contained red plush furniture, which embodied the acme of good taste at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. It contained a pier gla.s.s fantastically stuck from top to bottom with New Year"s cards, cards of congratulation, and ill.u.s.trated advertis.e.m.e.nts of soaps and powders. It contained photographs on the walls of actors once famous, whose fame in the meantime had faded no less than the autographs they had written beneath their pictures. It contained a washstand, whose marble top was covered with a tidy embroidered with the sententious couplet:
To keep your body clean, be sure To have your conscience just as pure.
It contained photograph alb.u.ms, card-cases, a cigar clip in the shape of a windmill of olive wood, a green gla.s.s punch bowl, and a shaky pine bed modestly hidden behind blue woolen portieres.
It contained, finally, hung over the sofa in a gilt-edged gla.s.s case, a mysterious round creation. The thing consisted of six strips of paper braided together and radiating from a common centre. It was covered with gauze, beneath which the outline of pressed flowers could dimly be distinguished.
It was in this best room on Neanderstra.s.se, four flights up, over a china shop, a piano-renting establishment, and a "repair studio," from the windows of which room an oblique view was to be obtained of the greenish grey waves of the Engelbecken, and into which a broad expanse of genuine Berlin smoky sky actually shone, that Lilly one day landed.
Mrs. Laue was a woman of fifty, worn out by overwork, with a face like a dried apple, and great staring, tearful eyes. She circled about Lilly in incredulous admiration, as if unable to comprehend that so much brilliance and beauty had strayed into her home.
The very day of her arrival Lilly was informed of her history. Her husband had been cashier and bookkeeper at one of the favorite variety theatres in Berlin, and twenty years before had departed this world, leaving her without home or protection. There was no rosy glamour to glorify tears wept in solitude, no comic songs to drown the cry of hunger.
Here that mysterious round creation, which on closer inspection proved to be a lamp shade, came to her rescue. It had been presented to her by an artistic friend, and it occurred to her to use it as a model for making others to sell.
After peddling her wares about for years, after long drudgery and disenchantments of all sorts, she at last conquered a market for her "pressed-flower lamp shades," and won for herself a name as specialist in her field.
In her back room with one window, which smelled of hay and paste, and where hundreds of dried flowers lay on a long white deal table--she herself did not gather them, of course, for lack of time--she had worked for nearly two decades tapping, daubing, pasting, drying, threading, and weaving sixteen hours a day, and had earned--thanks to her renown as a specialist!--so much that she was compelled to rent her best room, her treasure chamber, her sanctuary, to a stranger for thirty marks a month.
Lilly and Mrs. Laue, it is true, did not remain strangers.
Into the existence of this back-room being, in whose eyes a few betinseled ballet-dancers were paragons of beauty, the embodiment of unattainable splendour, Lilly descended from the world of genuine aristocracy as from heavenly heights. Her hostess idolised her, because she saw in her a messenger from that wholly improbable land which exists only in novels, and in which words like "lackey" and "drawing-room," and "pearl necklace"--Lilly soon told Mrs. Laue of hers--and other such things as one allows to melt on one"s tongue with half-closed eyes, are taken as a matter of course.
Mrs. Laue immediately became Lilly"s confidante and counsellor. She helped her overcome the shame consequent upon the divorce trial, she encouraged her when the feeling of being lost unnerved her, and she held before her eyes the prospect of a radiant future.
In great, powerful, wonder-working Berlin, n.o.body need succ.u.mb. Every day a dozen lucky chances might occur to help one to one"s feet. There were lonely old ladies who were desperately seeking heiresses for their fortunes, there were n.o.ble young women who, disgusted with the artificiality of their surroundings, helplessly yearned to reach out the hand of companionship to a beautiful poor orphan; there were celebrated artists who sought to escape the snares of lewd women in the arms of a pure love; there were great poets with whom the position of muse had become vacant.
The whole city seemed to have been waiting for Lilly"s coming to lift her jubilantly to the throne of mistress.
More months pa.s.sed.
Regret for her squandered life gradually lost its edge. Her nights became calmer. She no longer started out of a drowse with a cry because some picture of her paradise lost stood before her with horrible vividness.
But one thing she did not learn: to consider the brief span during which she had wandered on the heights as a mere episode that had interrupted her true, modest life like a caprice, a dream. In her consciousness she was and remained a sort of enchanted princess in the guise of a beggar until it pleased Providence to reinstate her in her own.
She solicitously cherished everything reminding her of her vanished glory.
The gala robes the colonel had had made for her in Dresden hung in Mrs.
Laue"s wardrobe; her underwear embroidered with the seven-pointed coronet filled Mrs. Laue"s empty drawers with their blossom-like delicacy, and in a long row in front of the tall mirror in Mrs. Laue"s best room lay the superb toilet articles of ivory and gold which had once been the pride of her "boudoir." These, too, still bore the seven-pointed coronet. Lilly would have considered it an outrage upon her most sacred rights had she had to part with them.
And all the time she awaited the future. She still studied advertis.e.m.e.nts, and wrote letters applying for positions; but the advertis.e.m.e.nts were usually forgotten and the letters seldom mailed.
However, feeling the need of occupation and companionship, she got into the habit of sitting with Mrs. Laue in the back room and helping her with her work. Soon she, too, was tapping, pasting, daubing, threading, and weaving just like her teacher. Having inherited taste and talent for everything artistic she soon outstripped Mrs. Laue. After having sold the shades Mrs. Laue would relate without envy how the patterns she designed and set together were instantly recognised and preferred.
Lilly"s ambition was aroused. She strove to create works of art. She could not toil enough.
"If you wouldn"t fool such a time over every little spray," was Mrs.
Laue"s criticism, "you would make more money than I do." After each transaction Mrs. Laue honestly settled accounts with Lilly.
But Lilly was satisfied with the forty or fifty marks a month that her work brought in. Her newly aroused fancy flew toward higher goals.
The dried gra.s.ses, the "gra.s.s flowers," as Mrs. Laue called them, charmed her especially. Their slender, aspiring stalks, the delicate grace of their branchings, the weary mourning of their hanging sprays, caused them to resemble tiny trees, weeping willows at the edge of a brook, ash-trees inclining over marble urns, or palms longingly rooted on parched rocks.
Lilly dreamed of a new sort of art--paintings on transparent gla.s.s with foregrounds of dried gra.s.s; lamp shades and window shades, on which woods of flowering gra.s.s and ferns charmingly shaded pasteboard houses standing out in relief with their windows cut out to let light shine as if from within; fleecy clouds, glowing sunsets, ridges of hills in hazy outline, and dark blue rivers, across which the moon threw swaying bridges of light.
An endless succession of pictures suddenly took form in Lilly"s mind, and new ones kept coming and coming. She did not know what to do with all that wealth of imagery.
Mrs. Laue, who for twenty years had unswervingly stuck to pasting her oiled paper and felt that every desire to abandon her modest work was heretical, warned Lilly with all her might.
But Lilly was possessed.
And one day she resorted to extreme measures. She took her arrow-shaped brooch set with six small emeralds to the jeweler, who gave her eighty marks. It was worth five times as much, of course. She used the money to buy polished cut-gla.s.s plates, which were held together in pairs by bra.s.s screws and could be hung at the window by dainty chains. She also purchased a box of paints, and while Mrs. Laue clasped her hands in dismay, she set to painting bravely.