In the midst of the struggle she succeeded in reaching the bell.
The maid appeared.
He picked up his hat from the carpet, murmured something like "riffraff," and disappeared.
Disappeared also from the little circle that he had sometimes honoured with his presence.
Henceforth Lilly ceased to aspire to the heights.
CHAPTER XI
The next year Lilly went through two little love affairs which were of no significance in her after life.
During a four weeks" stay in the Riesengebirge, she met a novelist whose name was then on everybody"s lips. He was airing his newly acquired fame in the Bohemian resorts and plucking what flowers he found by the roadside. He forced himself upon Lilly without much ceremony, and a few days later went his way in search of pastures new.
And in Berlin she favoured a handsome, extremely elegant hussar of the Guards, who had flirted with her from his seat at the next table in an aristocratic restaurant. But he wounded her pride by attempting to repay her with a little leather box which came from the jeweler"s. She sent back the box and turned him off.
She disliked the thought of both adventures, and soon wiped them entirely from her memory.
At Christmas a companion came to live with her. She had frequently complained to Richard that her life was empty; she craved something alive and loving to take care of. So he gave her a little naked monkey which could not warm itself even in her bosom. When angry, the monkey spat his scorn of her yearning in her face.
Every now and then a marriage scheme was again propounded.
Lilly knew the signs perfectly.
When Richard paced through all the rooms, taciturn and distraught, wrinkling his forehead; when apropos of nothing he began to philosophise on the futility of all things earthly; when mama required the carriage at unwonted hours, and little packages of concert and opera tickets filled his purse, she knew something was impending.
And then it seldom lasted long before Richard broke silence.
One had two millions, the other three. Influential relatives, mines, factories, legacies, government contracts, whole blocks of houses, and innumerable building lots nodded in the distance.
Sometimes Lilly"s drawing-room hummed with so many figures that it might have been a stockbroker"s office.
One of the prospective brides even was poor. But she was a general"s daughter, and mama adored her.
"I"m a general"s widow," said Lilly.
Whether rich or poor, they all disappeared, because none of them was good enough for him.
Lilly meditated and schemed; this is the way she should be, and this way, and this way. She must have white, column-like arms such as the Danish girl at the carnival; and she must have an extremely delicate, scarcely perceptible bosom--her own seemed to Lilly to have become too voluptuous--and when she laughed, two dimples must form in her cheeks, because dimples were a sign of peaceableness.
Peace she demanded for him above all. She knew he could not bear disputes. As a matter of fact they never did quarrel. But if a little disagreement arose, he went about for days looking miserable, spoke in a woebegone, sick tone, and had to be petted like a child. Which she did with joy, though he by no means deserved it.
For, whatever the standpoint from which you viewed such things, he had become an out and out good-for-nothing.
He might be pardoned the very respectable sums he lost at the club, but he debauched like a married man, and his experiences were none of the purest.
One day a pretty young thing with an eight weeks" old baby on her arm came to Lilly and wept and screamed, and declared Lilly must cede her place to her because she had the child by him and so the greater right.
Lilly comforted her and gave her some wine, and, filled with envy, tickled the baby"s wet little chin until it laughed. Whereupon the girl left quieted, and even kissed Lilly"s hand on parting.
That afternoon Richard listened to an eloquent discourse.
Lilly felt herself to be entirely free from jealousy.
Whenever he appeared looking embarra.s.sed or with a crafty expression in his eyes, his head inclined all the way to the left, and radiating an odour of cheap perfumes, she always received him with an indulgent smile, which he understood very well and feared like a plague.
However valiant his resolve to maintain silence, it scarcely lasted half an hour before he sat there hopelessly stranded, making partly veiled confessions and asking for praise and comfort.
In a life of this sort, which reflected all the faults and perfidies of marriage without bestowing its sense of dignity and natural rights, it was inevitable that Lilly should withdraw into herself more and more and look forward to her future with increasing gloom.
She pa.s.sed her days as on a swaying bough in momentary expectation of being blown into the depths. Then again her life seemed to her like a straight, bare road, which gave no signs of coming to an end, but ever unrolled hopeless stretches ahead.
Always the same pleasures, the same faces, the same aimless drifting from place to place until dawn.
Sometimes she felt so weary--as if after a day"s hard labour.
Sometimes, too, she went on strike, and remained in bed reading the _Fliegende Blatter_, or dreaming of old times with closed eyes.
Mrs. Asmussen"s sunless hole among the books became a paradise, her mush, food for the G.o.ds. Lilly"s thoughts stepped cautiously about the pictures of her girlhood loves, as if it were a crime to charm them back into being. From this arose a happy, yet fearful presentiment that one or the other of them would return, and hold out his hand, and say: "Now you have strayed in strange lands long enough. Come back home."
Which of them it was she did not venture to say. But one of them it must be. Something, something _must_ happen. It could _not_ go on the same way.
Now and then, when her secret disquiet filled her with unrest, she took again to her nocturnal strolls. In the electric tram she would ride to distant districts, where, with a guilty soul, she sauntered along lively streets.
Just like Mrs. Jula.
Yet she could never bring herself to listen to any of her pursuers.
It was on one such excursion in May far out on the north side, somewhere near the Rosentaler Tor, that she met a young man who paid not the slightest attention to her, who did not look like a gentleman, and yet seemed familiar.
So familiar that her heart pained her.
She racked her brain, but could not place him.
Making up her mind quickly she turned about and followed him.
He wore a brown, sweat-soaked hat and a salt and pepper suit with a yellow tinge to it, which had seen better days. His coat collar was shiny, and his knees had worked great bags into his trousers, the bottom of which hung in black fringes over his crooked heels.
None of her friends in disguise. Her friends wore different trousers.