He spoke with the same offended air as when Lilly had referred to her divorce.
"He must be extremely moral still!" she thought, with a sense of her own guilt and unworthiness.
But he was unhappy. That was certain.
And poor, very poor. Poorer than she had ever been in her life. Perhaps he was suffering the pangs of hunger while he walked at her side shivering in his thin, shabby jacket.
"How would it be, Mr. Redlich, provided your business permits you to, if you were to come to dinner to-morrow?"
His business, as a matter of fact, made it practically impossible for him to get off in the middle of the day, and he hadn"t a moment"s time for changing his clothes; but if she would receive him in the suit he was wearing--
"Oh of course," she laughed. "I"ll even serve you with your mother"s potato soup."
With that she pressed both his hands and slipped into a street car.
Oh, what a piece of good fortune!
Now she had the thing she had so long been seeking. Some one whom she could care for and pet and spoil; some one to whom she meant more than a toy or a show piece, who needed her as he needed bread and air, who languished for a gentle hand to lead him back to hope and joy.
Some one all to herself, all to herself!
Out of the grave of her youth he had risen exactly as she had dreamed in her dreams.
Life would again become rich--and happy--and full of secrets, tiny, gay, absolutely innocent secrets.
That night she slept little, wakeful as a child the night before Christmas.
The next morning, to the vast astonishment of the maid, a buxom wench from the country, who had rapidly fallen into city ways, Lilly rose early--the maid knew her to be a bit lazy--and went off to market.
"A friend is coming to dinner," Lilly laughingly explained.
She had to buy everything herself, the meat, the radishes, and above all the sausage that had once been the pride of his mother"s potato soup.
She even attended to the cooking herself.
She set the table and removed the palm from beside the aquarium to have something green in the dining-room in place of flowers, which she had forgotten to buy.
He was the first dinner guest she had had for two and a half years, and such a dear one--the dearest, perhaps that life could present her with.
At half past twelve the maid, turning up her nose, announced a young fellow who insisted upon speaking to the lady.
"Why, that"s he!" cried Lilly.
"He doesn"t look it," observed the maid with a haughty upward inflection in her voice. Shrugging her shoulders she dawdled behind her mistress, who ran to meet the guest.
At first he shyly hesitated to step into the lighter part of the room, and hugged the door post and pulled at his suit, which really looked dreadfully frayed, even more so than the night before.
His inflamed eyes, two red rifts, blinking behind his round gla.s.ses, gave him a sheepish, groping, helpless appearance. The bold thinker"s forehead had acquired an unpleasant backward slope because the genius lock no longer fell over it. And the triumphant blond mane had turned into a strawy, matted ma.s.s, apparently untouched by a comb this many a day.
He was unable to say much.
He swallowed the potato soup with tremulous devoutness, leaving the slices of sausage for the last. When his plate was quite dry he spitted them on his fork one at a time, and on conveying each bit to his mouth cast suspicious glances to right and left as if somebody were standing nearby to s.n.a.t.c.h it away.
The roast he received with greater composure. He heaped his plate high without paying the least attention to the maid, who grinned villainously.
He drank Richard"s good claret in long draughts. A mottled red flecked his cheeks; he laughed and felt he was himself again.
At first Lilly had been somewhat depressed; but as he gradually thawed out, she began to hope he might be made to pa.s.s muster after all.
Then it suddenly occurred to her that now at last an opportunity presented itself for the genuine salvation of a human being, not merely a game of enamoured self-deception as with Walter von Prell.
The thought filled her with blissful, confident hope.
After the meal they went into the drawing-room. With masterful ease of manner born of the unwonted drink, he promptly seated himself in the rocking chair and tickled the snarling monkey.
He sat leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out. The fringed ends of his trousers slipped into the expanded tops of his boots, exposing the tattered rubber drawing loops.
It was an appalling sight.
"I"ll have to do something," thought Lilly, and cogitated on the best way to help him.
As for Mr. Redlich, now that his spirits were in turmoil, he turned his innermost being outward and aired his views of life.
Oh, what a display of gall and poison!
He had become so embittered by long privation and eternal envy of those who seemed gay, happy, and favoured by fortune, that no values, no attainments, no prosperous undertakings could withstand his onslaught.
Everybody was hollow, corrupt and hypocritical. Everything depended on birth, cliqueism, "pull." Success, no matter in what line, was an ineradicable stain.
But this time also he said little of his personal experiences. Lilly could not even discover if he was still a student. He acknowledged only one thing, with bitter resentment, that his deepest feelings had been badly damaged in his constant struggle for existence.
While he spoke and laughed spasmodically, two lugubrious, sarcastic folds cut a deep semicircle in each emaciated cheek. Lilly dimly recalled that a tendency to those folds had existed in the times long ago.
"Oh, you poor, poor fellow!" she thought, and vowed soon to make a man of him again, both outwardly and inwardly.
But his visit left her feeling sad and depressed.
"After all--am I better off?" she thought. "Where is the confidence in life I used to have? Where is my joy of life? Where is my Song of Songs?"
The next afternoon, before Richard came, she devised a plan by which she could give Fritz Redlich new clothes without damage to Richard"s purse or Fritz Redlich"s feelings.
"Think of it," she said to Richard while they were drinking tea together, "two great events occurred to me yesterday, one a very happy one, the other very sad. The first is, I met a dear old friend I used to know when I was a girl. Before he went to the university he lived on the same floor as I did. And this morning a poor student was here. He looked simply wretched, and he asked for something to eat. In case he comes again, have you any old clothes to give him? No matter what. He needs everything."
"With pleasure," said Richard. "I don"t know what to do with all the stuff I have at any rate."
But the other one, the friend of her girlhood, made Richard thoughtful.