"The front door, I believe, is soon going to be closed, Miss."
"Impossible!" she cried, feigning lively astonishment. But if she were to act on the suggestion implied in his words her chance of at last becoming acquainted with him would certainly be lost, and she added in a tone lighter than accorded with her mood: "But it doesn"t matter. The window is open."
He uttered,
"H"m, h"m."
Whether in agreement or blame she could not determine, and the conversation would have come to a standstill without fail had not Lilly made an effort to keep the ball rolling.
"We are neighbours, aren"t we?" she asked.
He jumped from his seat and with a sweep of his cap describing a semicircle between his head and his trousers" pocket, he said:
"Permit me to introduce myself. Fritz Redlich, senior in the high school."
Lilly once more experienced the reverential thrill that used to pa.s.s through her soul when she was in the Selecta and the last year cla.s.s of the boys" high school was mentioned. The fact was suddenly borne in upon her that now she was nothing better than a shop girl, and she grew hot with shame at the thought.
But she would not have it that her glorious past was to have been lived in vain.
"I was in the Selecta. I left last autumn," she said, "and I got to know some of you then."
"Whom?" he asked eagerly.
Lilly mentioned the names of two young men who had fluttered about her at the skating-rink, and asked whether he knew them.
"Certainly not," he answered with scorn, which did not seem wholly sincere. "They loaf too much for fellows like us, and they"re going to join a students" corps. We don"t do that sort of thing."
Silence ensued.
It had now grown so dark that Lilly could see only the outline of his figure as he idly leaned against the corner post of the bal.u.s.trade.
Fine drops of rain fell and lay in her hair. She could have remained there forever with the dark youthful form before her searching eyes and spring"s blessing lying cool on her head.
"You are engaged here in the circulating library?" he asked.
Lilly said "Yes," and was grateful to him for the elegant word "engaged," which seemed somewhat to improve her position.
"And you are preparing for the examinations?" she inquired in turn.
"In autumn--if everything goes well," he answered with a sigh.
"Then you are going out into the wide, wide world," she said with the rapt expression that girls adopt in compositions. "Going out to fight your way through life. Oh, how I envy you!"
"Why?" he asked in wonder. "Aren"t you fighting your way through life already?"
Lilly burst out laughing.
"Oh, if I were you," she cried, "what wouldn"t I do--oh!"
She exulted in her sensations. She felt her limbs stretching. She knew a gleam of triumph was flashing in her eyes, a gleam which could not triumph simply because it dissipated itself unseen in the dark.
It was impossible for her, from sheer joy, to remain where she was. She would have gone mad had she been compelled to stay there, formulating stiff words, while everything in her cried out:
"I love you."
She bade him a hasty good-night and ran into the library, bolting the door behind her. She ran up and down the narrow aisles between the cases, laughing and sighing, raising her arms aloft like a priestess at prayer, and knocking her elbows painfully against the shelves.
A yearning for symphonies, for great sustained major chords, welled up within her. She wanted to sing the Walhalla motif, but the Walhalla motif cannot be sung.
Suddenly an aria flitted through her mind, one of those songs which had palpitated through her childhood, without conveying any meaning to her, but which, for that very reason, had been the more purely consecrated.
I sought him whom my soul loved, I sought him, but I found him not.
I called him, But he gave me no answer.
The watchman that went about the city found me.
They smote me, they wounded me.
The keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.
She sang in a soft, uncertain voice, loud enough, however, to be heard through the window. But when she peeped from her observatory to convince herself that he was listening, she no longer saw him standing there.
She sang louder and leaned out. She tore open her tight-fitting dress to expose her bare breast to the rain drops.
Then all of a sudden she was overcome by a feeling of wretchedness; why, she did not know, but so strong it was she thought she would die of it.
She felt how the cruel watchers seized her; she felt the smart of the wound which rude hands caused her; she felt how the veil was being torn away which concealed from the eyes of the world the holy nakedness of her body. In shameless nudity, yet weeping drops of blood for bitter shame, she tottered through the streets, and sought and sought, yet _he_ was farther off than ever.
She sank on her knees at the window-sill, and pressing her face on its edge, wept bitterly in sweet dark sympathy with that image of herself straying through Jerusalem"s nocturnal streets.
Yet all this was sheer happiness!
CHAPTER VIII
And the happiness endured.
It nestled in the dusty corners, it perched on the bookshelves, it span golden cobwebs from beam to beam, it rode on every ray of light reflected from the windows opposite on the leather backs of the books.
Wherever she went, Lilly was accompanied by a humming medley of quivering tones, half motifs and s.n.a.t.c.hes of melodies, strains from an aeolian harp, the chirping of a cricket-on-the-hearth, the singing of a boiling kettle, and the soft twittering of birds.
Awake or asleep, she always heard it.
Now and then a few measures of the Song of Songs joined in exultingly.
Outwardly everything went along in the old ruts. Mrs. Asmussen was sometimes sober, sometimes full of sweet drugs. Husband and daughters rose and sank, sank and rose, through the entire gamut of ethical apprais.e.m.e.nt, plunged one moment into the deepest pit of depravity, exalted the next to the shining heights of apotheosis. One day a volume of Gerstacker was missing, another day a Balduin Mollhausen seemed to have been sucked into the swamps of the Orinoco.
Sometimes a puff of wind blowing through the window carried a little cloud of yellow powder to the edges of the shelves, from which it was wiped off like ordinary dust. Yet it conveyed a greeting from swaying boughs in bloom, which was all this spring brought to Lilly, except for a loads of lilacs carted past the library on their way to market.