"I--am--the divorced wife--of an army officer of high rank," she replied with downcast eyes.
This time--thank the Lord!--it was not a lie.
Yet, to be accurate, she had lied.
For see what she was _now_!
He clasped her hand, which lay next to his on the table, and held it an instant.
"If it is difficult for you to speak of your life, don"t," he said.
"Later, perhaps, when we know each other better, you will tell me. I will tell you about myself--and how I--came to do my work."
"The work of which you spoke that time?" Lilly asked, strangely stirred by the sudden solemnity of his tone.
Drawing a deep breath he stretched out his clenched fists and his eyes stared into s.p.a.ce.
"Yes--the work for which I live, which is my goal and mainstay and future; which takes the place of father and mother and friends and lover. For which this draught of wine was vintaged, and this hour created, and you yourself, you with your lovely, delicate beauty and your two begging hands, which were really fashioned for giving."
"I thought you wanted to speak of your work," said Lilly, softly.
"I am speaking of it. I always speak of it. I only want to show you how restlessly it absorbs my experiences. How many, for instance, have sung, painted and sculptured the Annunciation! And how many scholars have grubbed over it! Yet when I see the good, humble, astonished, almost frightened Virgin Mary eyes you are making this very instant, I feel the final word has not been spoken, the supreme conception is still to be formed. You see, that is the way everything must serve my work."
"Are you a poet?" asked Lilly, completely taken.
He smiled and shook his head.
"I"m neither a poet nor a painter, nor a historian, nor a psychologist.
Yet I must be something of each, and more to boot. My work requires it."
Then he told his story.
His father had been instructor at a university and an eminent jurist.
His mother had died in giving him birth, and his father did not survive her long. He then came under the care of his uncle, a rich, experienced old bachelor, who had pa.s.sed a lively life in business and pleasure-seeking, and now dwelt in merry singleness in his castle. He had given Dr. Rennschmidt an education and had a.s.sured him a small income which enabled him in a modest fashion to indulge his wishes and whims. Dr. Rennschmidt had intended to follow in his father"s footsteps and enter an academic career, but the examinations, which he had pa.s.sed honourably, had tried his health. So, to satisfy his uncle, he had given up the idea of a university career for the time being, and had gone out into the world. He had been drawn to Italy by his studies in the history of art, which he had always pursued with interest, though without considering them his life work. What fascinated him more than the churches and the museums was the free, beautiful humanity in which the lively southern race expressed its personality. He felt as if it had awakened in him a new, free humanity, conscious of its own powers. He felt more and more strongly the original unity of artistic and personal experience, past and present. The heroes of mythology and history, the characters in poetry and painting, and the poets and painters themselves all became so real and familiar that they seemed to be part of his own being. Surrounded by a people saturated with its own history, possessing the skill of a thousand years" exercise of art, always in touch with the spirit of the time, it seemed possible to him to penetrate into the emotional world of past generations. He learned to distinguish monuments of different periods and follow those related to each other step by step along the course of time.
His guide always had been and remained art. Art was best able to wring speech from the silence of death and bid the dust add new forms to the old. Only one thing was still missing, knowledge of the sources of its convincing might, the A B C"s of the language in which it expressed its thoughts.
Lilly strained herself to follow him. She had never before listened to such language; yet it was not strange. Remnants from of old, from long-forgotten times seemed to cling to the bottom of her soul, which harmonised with what he said.
"One day," he continued, "while I was staying in Venice, I went off on a short excursion to Padua. By railroad it"s about the same as going from Berlin to Potsdam. I wasn"t keen about seeing the art there, because I was still in the honeymoon intoxication of my love for the early Venetians. It was only for the sake of completeness. I got into a little church in which there are frescoes by Giotto. Do you know who he was?"
"Certainly--Giotto and Cimabue," she said proudly.
"Then I needn"t say more. I really had little left in me for him and his people, because, as I said, the quattrocentists had heated my imagination. Now just conceive a Roman amphitheatre completely ruined and overgrown with ivy, nothing but the outer walls still standing, like the walls of a garden. In the enclosure is the little church built of brick, as sober and prosaic as a Prussian Protestant praying barn."
Lilly smiled gratefully. A side-thrust at Protestantism was still a personal favour to her.
"Services are no longer held there. It has been set aside as a national monument. When I entered I saw nothing at first but a blue radiance from the walls, a sort of modest background, with long rows of pictures on it, the story of Christ told quite simply, the way a preacher speaking to poor people would tell it on Good Friday, provided he is the right preacher for poor people."
"But aren"t we all poor people in the presence of Christ?" Lilly ventured to interpose.
He paused, looked at her with large eyes, then a.s.sented eagerly.
"Certainly. But not only in the presence of Christ, in the presence also of every great personality, of every great truth. But it isn"t easy for us to cultivate that feeling--to make it clear to ourselves that we must be poor when what is given to us ought to enrich us. Religion is best able to inspire us with the feeling, if it finds the correct means of expression. And the Italians did. A poor man spoke to poor men. Therein lay the wealth of Giotto"s gift. For what moves us to tears is not his vast competence, it is his incompetence. Do you get what I mean?"
"I think I do," said Lilly, her face lighting up. "If a man desires something of us, and can merely stammer and stutter his desire, he affects us more than if he says it in a prepared discourse."
"Exactly!" he cried joyously. "That"s why Giotto"s scant speech, his stammering created the whole language of art. Everything before him had simply been learned by heart from dead, Byzantine models. For the first time a man read life with simple eyes and a simple heart, and extracted from it what he had to say. That is why he became the universal master.
To this very day if anyone succeeds in portraying supreme suffering and supreme delight with his brush, he owes his skill to that little church."
"I can conceive," cried Lilly, "that if the ocean had a source and a man were suddenly to come upon it, he would feel as you do."
In the exuberance of his emotion Dr. Rennschmidt seized Lilly"s arm with both hands.
"That"s the missing figure. It"s strong enough to express what took place in me. But I came upon another source. While I walked along those frescoed walls, something suddenly stood before me clearly--and my work was there, sprung from nothing: the history of emotions. Emotions, you know, as art has seen and portrayed them in all generations. Not only the pictorial and plastic arts. They are only a fraction. Literature also. Poetry as well as painting, sculpture as well as music. I thought in that way I might succeed in creating a true, genuine history of the development of the human heart, which no moralist, no historian, no psychologist has yet attempted. Why not? The doc.u.ments are at hand; just as fossils lie embedded in rocks for the guidance of zoologists. They need merely be cut out. What do you think? Isn"t it a work worth spending a lifetime on?"
"It is," said Lilly, with the same solemnity.
"Oh, but there"s much to be thought over first," he went on. "You cannot make an impetuous onslaught like a bull on a red rag. Often art leads us astray because it strove to reproduce something entirely different from the emotional life of its time. Whether it succeeded or not is another question. And often it was wanting in the necessary means of expression.
Oh, you and I will speak of this many more times. Don"t look so frightened. I need you. After this evening I could not get along without you. n.o.body before you ever listened with such faith and understanding.
Besides, I"ve grown to be an utter stranger here. The people I know are full of their own interests, and scarcely listen to me. Then, too, there"s a bit of madness in my undertaking, of which I really ought to be ashamed. But one thing comforts me: a bit of madness has underlain every great work until that work was completed and had compa.s.sed its end. Of course everybody has the same idea of his own work. So some time I"ll rise above that feeling. But now, while I"m wrestling, and every day I think I have discovered a new vein of gold and then am compelled to throw a good deal away because it"s pinchbeck, if I have n.o.body on whom I can pour out what oppresses and torments me, why the jumble fairly chokes me. So fate sent me to you. It was like an inner voice, which would not let me rest at my desk, but sent me out to watch your light. Now I have you, and I won"t let you go. G.o.d knows, I shouldn"t be so bold in my own behalf, but it"s for my work. It is clamouring for you. For heaven"s sake, why are you crying?"
"I"m not crying," said Lilly, and smiled at him.
But the tears kept rising, and veiled his lovely picture.
"I know what it is," he said sadly. "I wasn"t considerate. You are regretting your lost art, because I spoke so happily of my own work."
Lilly started back as if she had seen a ghost, and made vehement denial.
"No, no, it isn"t that! Really not!"
But he persisted in his belief; which drove the thorn of her own unworthiness all the deeper into her soul.
"Let us go," she requested. "There is so much a.s.sailing me--happiness and unhappiness and all sorts of things--outside I"ll be calmer."
It was long after midnight. A cold wind swept across the water and soughed in the bare branches.
He offered her his arm, and Lilly nestled in it as if she had been at home there from times immemorial.
For a while they were both silent
"In five minutes he"ll leave me," she thought. She could not bear the grief of impending loss.
"One thing is lying heavy on my conscience," he began. "You might think me overweening because I make so much of myself. But I don"t wish to appear more important than others. I know every vigorous young fellow must have a similar work to bring purpose into his life. One has a book to write, another a business to carry on, another a dependent to support. For some it"s enough if they keep their heads above water. It doesn"t matter what. If you let yourself go, you"re lost. And none of us want to be lost, do we?"
"I think I lost myself long ago," whispered Lilly, shuddering and crouching like a whipped dog.
He burst out laughing.
"You, the best, the finest, the n.o.blest."