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Title: The Indian Lily and Other Stories

Author: Hermann Sudermann

Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9994] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on November 6, 2003]

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THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INDIAN LILY AND OTHER STORIES ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Michael Lockey and PG Distributed Proofreaders

THE INDIAN LILY

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

HERMANN SUDERMANN

TRANSLATED BY

LUDWIG LEWISOHN, M.A.

1911

CONTENTS

THE INDIAN LILY

THE PURPOSE

THE SONG OF DEATH

THE VICTIM

AUTUMN

MERRY FOLK

THEA

THE INDIAN LILY

Chapter I.

It was seven o'clock in the morning when Herr von Niebeldingk opened the iron gate and stepped into the front garden whose wall of blossoming bushes separated the house from the street.

The sun of a May morning tinted the greyish walls with gold, and caused the open window-panes to flash with flame.

The master directed a brief glance at the second story whence floated the dull sound of the carpet-beater. He thrust the key rapidly into the keyhole for a desire stirred in him to slip past the porter's lodge unobserved.

"I seem almost to be--ashamed!" he murmured with a smile of self-derision as a similar impulse overcame him in front of the house door.

But John, his man--a dignified person of fifty--had observed his approach and stood in the opening door. The servant's mutton-chop whiskers and admirably silvered front-lock contrasted with a repressed reproach that hovered between his brows. He bowed deeply.

"I was delayed," said Herr von Niebeldingk, in order to say something and was vexed because this sentence sounded almost like an excuse.

"Do you desire to go to bed, captain, or would you prefer a bath?"

"A bath," the master responded. "I have slept elsewhere."

That sounded almost like another excuse.

"I'm obviously out of practice," he reflected as he entered the breakfast-room where the silver samovar steamed among the dishes of old Sevres.

He stepped in front of the mirror and regarded himself--not with the forbearance of a friend but the keen scrutiny of a critic.

"Yellow, yellow...." He shook his head. "I must apply a curb to my feelings."

Upon the whole, however, he had reason to be fairly satisfied with himself. His figure, despite the approach of his fortieth year, had remained slender and elastic. The sternly chiselled face, surrounded by a short, half-pointed beard, showed neither flabbiness nor bloat. It was only around the dark, weary eyes that the experiences of the past night had laid a net-work of wrinkles and shadows. Ten years ago pleasure had driven the hair from his temples, but it grew energetically upon his crown and rose, above his forehead, in a Mephistophelian curve.

The civilian's costume which often lends retired officers a guise of excessive spick-and-spanness had gradually combined with an easier bearing to give his figure a natural elegance. To be sure, six years had passed since, displeased by a nagging major, he had definitely hung up the dragoon's coat of blue.

He was wealthy enough to have been able to indulge in the luxury of that displeasure. In addition his estates demanded more rigorous management.... From Christmas to late spring he lived in Berlin, where his older brother occupied one of those positions at court that mean little enough either to superior or inferior ranks, but which, in a certain social set dependent upon the court, have an influence of inestimable value. Without assuming the part of either a social lion or a patron, he used this influence with sufficient thoroughness to be popular, even, in certain cases, to be feared, and belonged to that class of men to whom one always confides one's difficulties, never one's wife.

John came to announce to his master that the bath was ready. And while Niebeldingk stretched himself lazily in the tepid water he let his reflections glide serenely about the delightful occurrence of the past night.

That occurrence had been due for six months, but opportunity had been lacking. "I am closely watched and well-known," she had told him, "and dare not go on secret errands." ... Now at last their chance had come and had been used with clever circumspectness.... Somewhere on the Polish boundary lived one of her cousins to whose wedding she was permitted to travel alone.... She had planned to arrive in Berlin unannounced and, instead of taking the morning train from Eydtkuhnen, to take the train of the previous evening. Thus a night was gained whose history had no necessary place in any family chronicle and the memories of which could, if need were, be obliterated from one's own consciousness.... Her arrival and departure had caused a few moments of really needless anxiety. That was all. No acquaintance had run into them, no waiter had intimated any suspicion, the very cabby who drove them through the dawn had preserved his stupid lack of expression when Niebeldingk suddenly sprang from the vehicle and permitted the lady to be driven on alone....

Before his eyes stood her picture--as he had seen her lying during the night in his arms, fevered with anxiety and rapture ... Ordinarily her eyes were large and serene, almost drowsy.... The night had proven to him what a glow could be kindled in them. Whether her broad brows, growing together over the nose, could be regarded as a beautiful feature--that was an open question. He liked them--so much was certain.

"Thank heaven," he thought. "At last, once more--a woman."

And he thought of another who for three years had been allied to him by bonds of the tenderest intimacy and whom he had this night betrayed.

"Between us," he consoled himself, "things will remain as they have been, and I can enjoy my liberty."

He sprayed his body with the icy water of the douche and rang for John who stood outside of the door with a bath-robe.

When, ten minutes later, shivering comfortably, he entered the breakfast-room, he found beside his cup a little heap of letters which the morning post had brought. There were two letters that gripped his attention.

One read:

"Berlin N., Philippstrasse 10 a.

DEAR HERR VON NIEBELDINGK:--

For the past week I have been in Berlin studying agriculture, since, as you know, I am to take charge of the estate. Papa made me promise faithfully to look you up immediately after my arrival. It is merely due to the respect I owe you that I haven't kept my promise. As I know that you won't tell Papa I might as well confess to you that I've scarcely been sober the whole week.--Oh, Berlin is a deuce of a place!

If you don't object I will drop in at noon to-morrow and convey Papa's greetings to you. Papa is again afflicted with the gout.

With warm regards,

Your very faithful

FRITZ VON EHRENBERG."

The other letter was from ... her--clear, serene, full of such literary reminiscences as always dwelt in her busy little head.

"DEAR FRIEND:--

I wouldn't ask you: Why do I not see you?--you have not called for five days--I would wait quietly till your steps led you hither without persuasion or compulsion; but 'every animal loves itself' as the old gossip Cicero says, and I feel a desire to chat with you.

I have never believed, to be sure, that we would remain indispensable to each other. '_Racine passera comme le cafe_,' Mme. de Sevigne says somewhere, but I would never have dreamed that we would see so little of each other before the inevitable end of all things.

You know the proverb: even old iron hates to rust, and I'm only twenty-five.

Come once again, dear Master, if you care to. I have an excellent cigarette for you--Blum Pasha. I smoke a little myself now and then, but _c'est plus fort que moi_ and ends in head-ache.

Joko has at last learned to say 'Richard.' He trills the _r_ cunningly. He knows that he has little need to be jealous.

Good-bye!

ALICE."

He laughed and brought forth her picture which stood, framed and glazed, upon his desk. A delicate, slender figure--"_blonde comme les bles_"--with bluish grey, eager eyes and a mocking expression of the lips--it was she herself, she who had made the last years of his life truly livable and whose fate he administered rather than ruled.

She was the wife of a wealthy mine-owner whose estates abutted on his and with whom an old friendship, founded on common sports, connected him.

One day, suspecting nothing, Niebeldingk entered the man's house and found him dragging his young wife from room to room by the hair.... Niebeldingk interfered and felt, in return, the lash of a whip.... Time and place had been decided upon when the man's physician forbade the duel.... He had been long suspected, but no certain symptoms had been alleged, since the brave little woman revealed nothing of the frightful inwardness of her married life.... Three days later he was definitely sent to a sanitarium. But between Niebeldingk and Alice the memory of that last hour of suffering soon wove a thousand threads of helplessness and pity into the web of love.

As she had long lost her parents and as she was quite defenceless against her husband's hostile guardians, the care of her interests devolved naturally upon him.... He released her from troublesome obligations and directed her demands toward a safe goal.... Then, very tenderly, he lifted her with all the roots of her being from the old, poverty-stricken soil of her earlier years and transplanted her to Berlin where, by the help of his brother's wife--still gently pressing on and smoothing the way himself--he created a new way of life for her.

In a villa, hidden by foliage from Lake Constance, her husband slowly drowsed toward dissolution. She herself ripened in the sharp air of the capital and grew almost into another woman in this banal, disillusioned world, sober even in its intoxication.

Of society, from whose official section her fate as well as her commoner's name separated her, she saw just enough to feel the influence of the essential conceptions that governed it.

She lost diffidence and awkwardness, she became a woman of the world and a connoisseur of life. She learned to condemn one day what she forgave the next, she learned to laugh over nothing and to grieve over nothing and to be indignant over nothing.

But what surprised Niebeldingk more than these small adaptations to the omnipotent spirit of her new environment, was the deep revolution experienced by her innermost being.

She had been a clinging, self-effacing, timid soul. Within three years she became a determined and calculating little person who lacked nothing but a certain fixedness to be a complete character.

A strange coldness of the heart now emanated from her and this was strengthened by precipitate and often unkindly judgment, supported in its turn by a desire to catch her own reflection in all things and to adopt witty points of view.

Nor was this all. She acquired a desire to learn, which at first stimulated and amused Niebeldingk, but which had long grown to be something of a nuisance.

He himself was held, and rightly held, to be a man of intellect, less by virtue of rapid perception and flexible thought, than by virtue of a coolly observant vision of the world, incapable of being confused--a certain healthy cynicism which, though it never lost an element of good nature, might yet abash and even chill the souls of men.

His actual knowledge, however, had remained mere wretched patchwork, his logic came to an end wherever bold reliance upon the intuitive process was needed to supply missing links in the ratiocinative chain.

And so it came to pass that Alice, whom at first he had regarded as his scholar, his handiwork, his creature, had developed annoyingly beyond him.... Involuntarily and innocently she delivered the keenest thrusts. He had, actually, to be on guard.... In the irresponsible delight of intellectual crudity she solved the deepest problems of humanity; she repeated, full of faith, the judgments of the ephemeral rapid writer, instead of venturing upon the sources of knowledge. Yet even so she impressed him by her faculty of adaptation and her shining zeal. He was often silenced, for his slow moving mind could not follow the vagaries of that rapid little brain.

What would she be at again to-day? "The old gossip Cicero...." And, "Mme. de Sevigne remarks...." What a rattling and tinkling. It provoked him.

And her love! ... That was a bad business. What is one to do with a mistress who, before falling asleep, is capable of lecturing on Schopenhauer's metaphysics of sex, and will prove to you up to the hilt how unworthy it really is to permit oneself to be duped by nature if one does not share her aim for the generations to come?

The man is still to be born upon whom such wisdom, uttered at such an hour--by lips however sweet--does not cast a chill.

Since that philosophical night he had left untouched the little key that hung yonder over his desk and that give him, in her house, the sacred privileges of a husband. And so his life became once more a hunt after new women who filled his heart with unrest and with the foolish fires of youth.

But Alice had never been angry at him. Apparently she lacked nothing....

And his thoughts wandered from her to the woman who had lain against his breast to-night, shuddering in her stolen joy.

Heavens! He had almost forgotten one thing!

He summoned John and said:

"Go to the florist and order a bunch of Indian lilies. The man knows what I mean. If he hasn't any, let him procure some by noon."

John did not move a muscle, but heaven only knew whether he did not suspect the connection between the Indian lilies and the romance of the past night. It was in his power to adduce precedents.

It was an old custom of Niebeldingk's--a remnant of his half out-lived Don Juan years--to send a bunch of Indian lilies to those women who had granted him their supreme favours. He always sent the flowers next morning. Their symbolism was plain and delicate: In spite of what has taken place you are as lofty and as sacred in my eyes as these pallid, alien flowers whose home is beside the Ganges. Therefore have the kindness--not to annoy me with remorse.

It was a delicate action and--a cynical one.

Chapter II.

At noon--Niebeldingk had just returned from his morning canter--the visitor, previously announced, was ushered in.

He was a robust young fellow, long of limb and broad of shoulder. His face was round and tanned, with hot, dark eyes. With merry boldness, yet not without diffidence, he sidled, in his blue cheviot suit, into the room.

"Morning, Herr von Niebeldingk."

Enviously and admiringly Niebeldingk surveyed the athletic figure which moved with springy grace.

"Morning, my boy ... sober?"

"In honour of the day, yes."

"Shall we breakfast?"

"Oh, with delight, Herr von Niebeldingk!"

They passed into the breakfast-room where two covers had already been laid, and while John served the caviare the flood of news burst which had mounted in their Franconian home during the past months.

Three betrothals, two important transfers of land, a wedding, Papa's gout, Mama's charities, Jenny's new target, Grete's flirtation with the American engineer. And, above all things, the examination!

"Dear Herr von Niebeldingk, it's a rotten farce. For nine years the gymnasium trains you and drills you, and in the end you don't get your trouble's worth! I'm sorry for every hour of cramming I did. They released me from the oral exam., simply sent me out like a monkey when I was just beginning to let my light shine! Did you ever hear of such a thing? Did you ever?"

"Well, and how about your university work, Fritz?"

That was a ticklish business, the youth averred. Law and political science was no use. Every ass took that up. And since it was after all only his purpose to pass a few years of his green youth profitably, why he thought he'd stick to his trade and find out how to plant cabbages properly.

"Have you started in anywhere yet?"

Oh, there was time enough. But he had been to some lectures--agronomy and inorganic chemistry.... You have to begin with inorganic chemistry if you want to go in for organic. And the latter was agricultural chemistry which was what concerned him.

He made these instructive remarks with a serious air and poured down glass after glass of Madeira. His cheeks began to glow, his heart expanded. "But that's all piffle, Herr von Niebeldingk, ... all this book-worm business can go to the devil.... Life--life--life--that's the main thing!"

"What do you call life, Fritz?"

With both hands he stroked the velvety surface of his close-cropped skull.

"Well, how am I to tell you? D'you know how I feel? As if I were standing in front of a great, closed garden ... and I know that all Paradise is inside ... and occasionally a strain of music floats out ... and occasionally a white garment glitters ... and I'd like to get in and I can't. That's life, you see. And I've got to stand miserably outside?"

"Well, you don't impress me as such a miserable creature?"

"No, no, in a way, not. On the coarser side, so to speak, I have a good deal of fun. Out there around Philippstrasse and Marienstrasse there are women enough--stylish and fine-looking and everything you want. And my friends are great fellows, too. Every one can stand his fifteen glasses ... I suppose I am an ass, and perhaps it's only moral katzenjammer on account of this past week. But when I walk the streets and see the tall, distinguished houses and think of all those people and their lives, yonder a millionaire, here a minister of state, and think that, once upon a time, they were all crude boys like myself--well, then I have the feeling as if I'd never attain anything, but always remain what I am."

"Well, my dear Fritz, the only remedy for that lies in that 'book-worm business' as you call it. Sit down on your breeches and work!"

"No, Herr von Niebeldingk, it isn't that either ... let me tell you. Day before yesterday I was at the opera.... They sang the Goetterddmmerung.... You know, of course. There is Siegfried, a fellow like myself, ... not more than twenty ... I sat upstairs in the third row with two seamstresses. I'd picked them up in the _Chausseestrasse_--cute little beasts, too.... But when Brunhilde stretched out her wonderful, white arms to him and sang: 'On to new deeds, O hero!' why I felt like taking the two girls by the scruff of the neck and pitching them down into the pit, I was so ashamed. Because, you see, Siegfried had his Brunhilde who inspired him to do great deeds. And what have I? ... A couple of hard cases picked up in the street."

"Afterwards, I suppose, you felt more reconciled?"

"That shows how little you know me. I'd promised the girls supper. So I had to eat with them. But when that was over I let 'em slide. I ran about in the streets and just--howled!"

"Very well, but what exactly are you after?"

"That's what I don't know, Herr von Niebeldingk. Oh, if I knew! But it's something quite indefinite--hard to think, hard to comprehend. I'd like to howl with laughter and I don't know why ... to shriek, and I don't know what about."

"Blessed youth!" Niebeldingk thought, and looked at the enthusiastic boy full of emotion. ...

John, who was serving, announced that the florist's girl had come with the Indian lilies.

"Indian lilies, what sort of lilies are they?" asked Fritz overcome by a hesitant admiration.

"You'll see," Niebeldingk answered and ordered the girl to be admitted.

She struggled through the door, a half-grown thing with plump red cheeks and smooth yellow hair. Diffident and frightened, she nevertheless began to flirt with Fritz. In front of her she held the long stems of the exotic lilies whose blossoms, like gigantic narcissi, brooded in star-like rest over chaste and alien dreams. From the middle of each chalice came a sharp, green shimmer which faded gently along the petals of the flowers.

"Confound it, but they're beautiful!" cried Fritz. "Surely they have quite a peculiar significance."

Niebeldingk arose, wrote the address without permitting John, who stood in suspicious proximity, to throw a glance at it, handed cards and flowers to the girl, gave her a tip, and escorted her to the door himself.

"So they do mean something special?" Fritz asked eagerly. He couldn't get over his enthusiasm.

"Yes, my boy."

"And may one know...."

"Surely, one may know. I give these lilies to that lady whose lofty purity transcends all doubt--I give them as a symbol of my chaste and desireless admiration."

Fritz's eyes shone.

"Ah, but I'd like to know a lady like that--some day!" he cried and pressed his hands to his forehead.

"That will come! That will come!" Niebeldingk tapped the youth's shoulder calmingly.

"Will you have some salad?"

Chapter III.

Around the hour of afternoon tea Niebeldingk, true to a dear, old habit, went to see his friend.

She inhabited a small second-floor apartment in the Regentenstrasse which he had himself selected for her when she came as a stranger to Berlin. With flowers and palms and oriental rugs she had moulded a delicious retreat, and before her bed-room windows the nightingales sang in the springtime.

She seemed to be expecting him. In the great, raised bay, separated from the rest of the drawing-room by a thicket of dark leaves, the stout tea-urn was already expectantly humming.

In a bright, girlish dress, devoid of coquetry or pouting, Alice came to meet him.

"I'm glad you're here again, Richard."

That was all.

He wanted to launch out into the tale which he had meant to tell her, but she cut him short.

"Since when do I demand excuses, Richard? You come and there you are. And if you don't come, I have to be content too." "You should really be a little less tolerant," he warned her.

"A blessed lot it would help me," she answered merrily.

Gently she took his arm and led him to his old place. Then silently, and with that restrained eagerness that characterised all her actions she busied herself with the tea-urn.

His critical and discriminating gaze followed her movements. With swift, delicate gestures she pushed forward the Chinese dish, shook the tea from the canister and poured the first drops of boiling water through a sieve.... Her quick, bird-like head moved hither and thither, and the bow of the orange-coloured ribbon which surrounded her over-delicate neck trembled a little with every motion.

"She really is the most charming of all," such was the end of his reflections, "if only she weren't so damnably sensible."

Silently she took her seat opposite him, folded her white hands in her lap, and looked into his eyes with such significant archness that he began to feel embarrassed.

Had she any suspicion of his infidelities?

Surely not. No jealous woman can look about her so calmly and serenely.

"What have you been doing all this time?" he asked.

"I? Good heavens! Look about you and you'll see."

She pointed to a heap of books which lay scattered over the window seat and sewing table.

There were Moltke's letters and the memoirs of von Schoen, and Max Mueller's Aryan studies. Nor was the inevitable Schopenhauer lacking.

"What are you after with all that learning?" he asked.

"Ah, dear friend, what is one to do? One can't always be going about in strange houses. Do you expect me to stand at the window and watch the clouds float over the old city-wall?"

He had the uncomfortable impression that she was quoting something again.

"My mood," she went on, "is in what Goethe calls the minor of the soul. It is the yearning that reaches out afar and yet restrains itself harmoniously within itself. Isn't that beautifully put?"

"It may be, but it's too high for me!" In laughing self-protection, he stretched out his arms toward her.

"Don't make fun of me," she said, slightly shamed, and arose.

"And what is the object of your yearning?" he asked in order to leave the realm of Goethe as swiftly as possible. "Not you, you horrible person," she answered and, for a moment, touched his hair with her lips.

"I know that, dearest," he said, "it's a long time since you've sent me two notes a day."

"And since you came to see me twice daily," she returned and gazed at the floor with a sad irony.

"We have both changed greatly, Alice."

"We have indeed, Richard."

A silence ensued.

His eyes wandered to the opposite wall.... His own picture, framed in silvery maple-wood, hung there.... Behind the frame appeared a bunch of blossoms, long faded and shrivelled to a brownish, indistinguishable heap.

These two alone knew the significance of the flowers....

"Were you at least happy in those days, Alice?"

"You know I am always happy, Richard."

"Oh yes, yes; I know your philosophy. But I meant happy with me, through me?"

She stroked her delicate nose thoughtfully. The mocking expression about the corners of her mouth became accentuated.

"I hardly think so, Richard," she said after an interval. "I was too much afraid of you ... I seemed so stupid in comparison to you and I feared that you would despise me." "That fear, at least, you have overcome very thoroughly?" he asked.

"Not wholly, Richard. Things have only shifted their basis. Just as, in those days, I felt ashamed of my ignorance, so now I feel ashamed--no, that isn't the right word.... But all this stuff that I store up in my head seems to weigh upon me in my relations with you. I seem to be a nuisance with it.... You men, especially mature men like yourself, seem to know all these things better, even when you don't know them.... The precise form in which a given thought is presented to us may be new to you, but the thought itself you have long digested. It's for this reason that I feel intimidated whenever I approach you with my pursuits. 'You might better have held your peace,' I say to myself. But what am I to do? I'm so profoundly interested!"

"So you really need the society of a rather stupid fellow, one to whom all this is new and who will furnish a grateful audience?"

"Stupid? No," she answered, "but he ought to be inexperienced. He ought himself to want to learn things.... He ought not to assume a compassionate expression as who should say: 'Ah, my dear child, if you knew what I know, and how indifferent all those things are to me!' ... For these things are not indifferent, Richard, not to me, at least.... And for the sake of the joy I take in them, you ..."

"Strange how she sees through me," he reflected, "I wonder she clings to me as she does."

And while he was trying to think of something that might help her, the dear boy came into his mind who had to-day divulged to him the sorrows of youth and whom the unconscious desire for a higher plane of life had driven weeping through the streets.

"I know of some one for you."

Her expression was serious.

"You know of some one for me," she repeated with painful deliberateness.

"Don't misunderstand me. It's a playfellow, a pupil--something in the nature of a pastime, anything you will."

He told her the story of Siegfried and the two seamstresses.

She laughed heartily.

"I was afraid you wanted to be rid of me," she said, laying her forehead for a few moments against his sleeve.

"Shame on you," he said, carelessly stroking her hair. "But what do you think? Shall I bring the young fellow?"

"You may very well bring him," she answered. There was a look of pain about her mouth. "Doesn't one even train young poodles?"

Chapter IV.

Three days later, at the same hour of the afternoon, the student, Fritz von Ehrenberg entered Niebeldingk's study.

"I have summoned you, dear friend, because I want to introduce you to a charming young woman," Niebeldingk said, arising from his desk.

"Now?" Fritz asked, sharply taken aback.

"Why not?"

"Why, I'd have to get my--my afternoon coat first and fix myself up a bit. What is the lady to think of me?"

"I'll take care of that. Furthermore, you probably know her, at least by reputation."

He mentioned the name of her husband which was known far and wide in their native province.

Fritz knew the whole story.

"Poor lady!" he said. "Papa and Mama have often felt sorry for her. I suppose her husband is still living."

Niebeldingk nodded.

"People all said that you were going to marry her."

"Is that what people said?" "Yes, and Papa thought it would be a piece of great good fortune."

"For whom?"

"I beg your pardon, I suppose that was tactless, Herr von Niebeldingk."

"It was, dear Fritz.--But don't worry about it, just come."

The introduction went smoothly. Fritz behaved as became the son of a good family, was respectful but not stiff, and answered her friendly questions briefly and to the point.

"He's no discredit to me," Niebeldingk thought.

As for Alice, she treated her young guest with a smiling, motherly care which was new in her and which filled Niebeldingk with quiet pleasure.... On other occasions she had assumed toward young men a tone of wise, faint interest which meant clearly: "I will exhaust your possibilities and then drop you." To-day she showed a genuine sympathy which, though its purpose may have been to test him the more sharply, seemed yet to bear witness to the pure and free humanity of her soul.

She asked him after his parental home and was charmed with his naive rapture at escaping the psychical atmosphere of the cradle-songs of his mother's house. She was also pleased with his attitude toward his younger brothers and sisters, equally devoid, as it was, of exaggeration or condescension. Everything about him seemed to her simple and sane and full of ardour after information and maturity.

Niebeldingk sat quietly in his corner ready, at need, to smooth over any outbreak of uncouth youthfulness. But there was no occasion. Fritz confined himself within the limits of modest liberty and used his mind vigorously but with devout respect and delighted obedience. Once only, when the question of the necessity of authority came up, did he go far.

"I don't give a hang for any authority," he said. "Even the mild compulsion of what are called high-bred manners may go to the deuce for me!"

Niebeldingk was about to interfere with some reconciling remark when he observed, to his astonishment, that Alice who, as a rule, was bitterly hostile to all strident unconventionality, had taken no offence.

"Let him be, Niebeldingk," she said. "As far as he is concerned he is, doubtless, in the right. And nothing would be more shameful than if society were already to begin to make a featureless model boy of him."

"That will never be, I swear to you, dear lady," cried Fritz all aglow and stretching out his hands to ward off imaginary chains. Niebeldingk smiled and thought: "So much the better for him." Then he lit a fresh cigarette.

The conversation turned to learned things. Fritz, paraphrasing Tacitus, vented his hatred of the Latin civilisations. Alice agreed with him and quoted Mme. de Stael. Niebeldingk arose, quietly meeting the reproachful glance of his beloved.

Fritz jumped up simultaneously, but Niebeldingk laughingly pushed him back into his seat.

"You just stay," he said, "our dear friend is only too eager to slaughter a few more peoples."

Chapter V.

When he dropped in at Alice's a few days later he found her sitting, hot-cheeked and absorbed, over Strauss's Life of Jesus.

"Just fancy," she said, holding up her forehead for his kiss, "that young poodle of yours is making me take notice. He gives me intellectual nuts to crack. It's strange how this young generation--"

"I beg of you, Alice," he interrupted her, "you are only a very few years his senior."

"That may be so," she answered, "but the little education I have derives from another epoch.... I am, metaphysically, as unexacting as the people of your generation. A certain fogless freedom of thought seemed to me until to-day the highest point of human development."

"And Fritz von Ehrenberg, student of agriculture, has converted you to a kind of thoughtful religiosity?" he asked, smiling good-naturedly.

In her zeal she wasn't even aware of his irony.

"We're not going to give in so easily.... But it is strange what an impression is made on one by a current of strong and natural feeling.... This young fellow comes to me and says: 'There is a God, for I feel Him and I need Him. Prove the contrary if you can.' ... Well, so I set about proving the contrary to him. But our poor negations have become so glib that one has forgotten the reasons for them. Finally he defeated me along the whole line ... so I sat down at once and began to study up ... just as one would polish rusty weapons ... Bible criticism and DuBois-Reymond and 'Force and Matter' and all the things that are traditionally irrefutable."

"And that amuses you?" he asked compassionately.

A theoretical indignation took hold of her that always amused him greatly.

"Does it amuse me? Are such things proper subjects for amusement? Surely you must use other expressions, Richard, when one is concerned for the most sacred goods of humanity...."

"Forgive me," he said, "I didn't mean to touch those things irreverently."

She stroked his arm softly, thus dumbly asking forgiveness in her turn.

"But now," she continued, "I am equipped once more, and when he comes to-morrow--"

"So he's coming to-morrow?"

"Naturally, ... then you will see how I'll send him home sorely whipped ... I can defeat him with Kant's antinomies alone.... And when it comes to what people call 'revelation,' well! ... But I assure you, my dear one, I'm not very happy defending this icy, nagging criticism.... To be quite sincere, I would far rather be on his side. Warmth is there and feeling and something positive to support one. Would you like some tea?"

"Thanks, no, but some brandy."

Rapidly brushing the waves of hair from her drawn forehead she ran into the next room and returned with the bottle bearing three stars on its label from which she herself took a tiny drop occasionally--"when my mind loses tone for study" as she was wont to say in self-justification.

A crimson afterglow, reflected from the walls of the houses opposite, filled the little drawing-room in which the mass of feminine ornaments glimmered and glittered.

"I've really become quite a stranger here," he thought, regarding all these things with the curiosity of one who has come after an absence. From each object hung, like a dewdrop, the memory of some exquisite hour.

"You look about you so," Alice said with an undertone of anxiety in her voice, "don't you like it here any longer?"

"What are you thinking of," he exclaimed, "I like it better daily." She was about to reply but fell silent and looked into space with a smile of wistful irony.

"If I except the Life of Jesus and the Kantian--what do you call the things?"

"Antinomies."

"Aha--_anti_ and _nomos_--I understand--well, if I except these dusty superfluities, I may say that your furnishings are really faultless. The quotations from Goethe are really more appropriate, although I could do without them."

"I'll have them swept out," she said in playful submission.

"You are a dear girl," he said playfully and passed his hand caressingly over her severely combed hair.

She grasped his arm with both hands and remained motionless for a moment during which her eyes fastened themselves upon his with a strangely rigid gleam.

"What evil have I done?" he asked. "Do you remember our childhood's verse: 'I am small, my heart is pure?' Have mercy on me."

"I was only playing at passion," she said with the old half-wistful, half-mocking smile, "in order that our relations may not lose solid ground utterly."

"What do you mean?" he asked, pretending astonishment. "And do you really think, Richard, that between us, things, being as they are--are right?"

"I can't imagine any change that could take place at present."

She hid a hot flush of shame. She was obviously of the opinion that he had interpreted her meaning in the light of a desire for marriage. All earthly possibilities had been discussed between them: this one alone had been sedulously avoided in all their conversations.

"Don't misunderstand me," he continued, determined to skirt the dangerous subject with grace and ease, "there's no question here of anything external, of any change of front with reference to the world. It's far too late for that. ... Let us remain--if I may so put it--in our spiritual four walls. Given our characters or, I had better say, given your character I see no other relation between us that promises any permanence.... If I were to pursue you with a kind of infatuation, or you me with jealousy--it would be insupportable to us both."

She did not reply but gently rolled and unrolled the narrow, blue silk scarf of her gown.

"As it is, we live happily and at peace," he went on, "Each of us has liberty and an individual existence and yet we know how deeply rooted our hearts are in each other."

She heaved a sigh of painful oppression. "Aren't you content?" he asked,

"For heaven's sake! Surely!" Her voice was frightened, "No one could be more content than I. If only----"

"Well--what?"

"If only it weren't for the lonely evenings!"

A silence ensued. This was a sore point and had always been. He knew it well. But he had to have his evenings to himself. There was nothing to be done about that.

"You musn't think me immodest in my demands," she went on in hasty exculpation. "I'm not even aiming my remarks at you ... I'm only thinking aloud.... But you see, I can't get any real foothold in society until--until my affairs are more clarified.... To run about the drawing-rooms as an example of frivolous heedlessness--that's not my way.... I can always hear them whisper behind me: 'She doesn't take it much to heart, that shows ...' No, I'd rather stay at home. I have no friends either and what chance had I to make them? You were always my one and only friend.... My books remain. And that's very well by day ... but when the lamps are lit I begin to throb and ache and run about ... and I listen for the trill of the door-bell. But no one comes, nothing--except the evening paper. And that's only in winter. Now it's brought before dusk. And in the end there's nothing worth while in it.... And so life goes day after day. At last one creeps into bed at half-past nine and, of course, has a wretched night."

"Well, but how am I to help you, dear child?" he asked thoughtfully. He was touched by her quiet, almost serene complaint. "If we took to passing our evenings together, scandal would soon have us by the throat, and then--woe to you!"

Her eager eyes gazed bravely at him.

"Well," she said at last, "suppose----"

"What?"

"Never mind. I don't want you to think me unwomanly. And what I've been describing to you is, after all, only a symptom. There's a kind of restlessness in me that I can't explain.... If I were of a less active temper, things would be better.... It sounds paradoxical, but just because I have so much activity in me, do I weary so quickly. Goethe said once----"

He raised his hands in laughing protest.

She was really frightened.

"Ah, yes, forgive me," she cried. "All that was to be swept out.... How forgetful one can be...."

Smiling, she leaned her head against his shoulder and was not to be persuaded from her silence.

Chapter VI

"There are delicate boundaries within the realm of the eternal womanly,"--thus Niebeldingk reflected next day,--"in which one is sorely puzzled as to what one had better put into an envelope: a poem or a cheque."

His latest adventure--the cause of these reflections--had blossomed, the evening before, like the traditional rose on the dungheap.

One of his friends who had travelled about the world a good deal and who now assumed the part of the full-blown Parisian, had issued invitations to a house-warming in his new bachelor-apartment. He had invited a number of his gayer friends and ladies exclusively from so-called artistic circles. So far all was quite Parisian. Only the journalists who might, next morning, have proclaimed the glory of the festivity to the world--these were excluded. Berlin, for various reasons, did not seem an appropriate place for that.

It was a rather dreary sham orgy. Even chaperones were present. Several ladies had carefully brought them and they could scarcely be put out. Other ladies even thought it incumbent upon them to ask after the wives of the gentlemen present and to turn up their noses when it appeared that these were conspicuous by their absence. It was upon this occasion, however, that some beneficent chance assigned to Niebeldingk a sighing blonde who remained at his side all evening.

Her name was Meta, she belonged to one of the "best families" of Posen, she lived in Berlin with her mother who kept a boarding house for ladies of the theatre. She herself nursed the ardent desire to dedicate herself to art, for "the ideal" had always been the guiding star of her existence.

At the beginning of supper she expressed herself with a fine indignation concerning the ladies present into whose midst--she assured him eagerly--she had fallen through sheer accident. Later she thawed out, assumed a friendly companionableness to these despised individuals and, in order to raise Niebeldingk's delight to the highest point, admitted with maidenly frankness the indescribable and mysterious attraction toward him which she had felt at the first glance.

Of course, her principles were impregnable. He mustn't doubt that. She would rather seek a moist death in the waves than.... and so forth. Although she made this solemn proclamation over the dessert, the consequence of it all was an intimate visit to Niebeldingk's dwelling which came to a bitter sweet end at three o'clock in the morning with gentle tears concerning the wickedness of men in general and of himself in particular....

An attack of _katzenjammer_--such as is scarcely ever spared worldly people of forty--threw a sobering shadow upon this event. The shadow crept forward too, and presaged annoyance.

He was such an old hand now, and didn't even know into what category she really fitted. Was it, after all, impossible that behind all this frivolity the desire to take up the struggle for existence on cleanly terms stuck in her little head?

At all events he determined to spare the possible wounding of outraged womanliness and to wait before putting any final stamp upon the nature of their relations. Hence he set out to play the tender lover by means of the well-tried device of a bunch of Indian lilies.

When he was about to give the order for the flowers to John who always, upon these occasions, assumed a conscientiously stupid expression, a new doubt overcame him.

Was he not desecrating the gift which had brought consolation and absolution to many a remorseful heart, by sending it to a girl who, for all he knew, played a sentimental part only as a matter of decent form? ... Wasn't there grave danger of her assuming an undue self-importance when she felt that she was taken tragically?

"Well, what did it matter? ... A few flowers! ..."

Early on the evening of the next day Meta reappeared. She was dressed in sombre black. She wept persistently and made preparations to stay.

Niebeldingk gave her to understand that, in the first place, he had no more time for her that evening, and that, in the second place, she would do well to go home at a proper hour and spare herself the reproaches of her mother.

"Oh, my little mother, my little mother," she wailed. "How shall I ever present myself to her sight again? Keep me, my beloved! I can never approach my, mother again."

He rang for his hat and gloves.

When she saw that he was serious she wept a few more perfunctory tears and went.

Her visits repeated themselves and didn't become any more delightful. On the contrary ... the heart-broken maiden gave him to understand that her lost honour could be restored only by the means of a speedy marriage. This exhausted his patience. He saw that he had been thoroughly taken in and so, observing all necessary considerateness, he sent her definitely about her business.

Next day the "little mother" appeared on the scene. She was a dignified woman of fifty, equipped as the Genius of Vengeance, exceedingly glib of tongue and by no means sentimental.

As she belonged to one of the first families of Posen, it was her duty to lay particular stress upon the honour of her daughter whom he had lured to his house and there wickedly seduced. ... She was prepared to repel any overtures toward a compromise. She belonged to one of the best families of Posen and was not prepared to sell her daughter's virtue. The only possible way of adjusting the matter was an immediate marriage.

Thereupon she began to scream and scold and John, who acted as master of ceremonies, escorted her with a patronising smile to the door....

Next came the visits of an old gentleman in a Prince Albert and the ribbon of some decoration in his button-hole.--John had strict orders to admit no strangers. But the old gentleman was undaunted. He came morning, noon and night and finally settled down on the stairs where Niebeldingk could not avoid meeting him. He was the uncle of Miss Meta, a former servant of the government and a knight of several honourable orders. As such it was his duty to demand the immediate restitution of his niece's honour, else--Niebeldingk simply turned his back and the knight of several honourable orders trotted, grumbling, down the stairs.

Up to this point Niebeldingk had striven to regard the whole business in a humorous light. It now began It now began to promise serious annoyance. He told the story at his club and the men laughed boisterously, but no one knew anything to the detriment of Miss Meta. She had been introduced by a lady who played small parts at a large theatre and important parts at a small one. The lady was called to account for her protegee. She refused to speak.

"It's all the fault of those accursed Indian lilies," Niebeldingk grumbled one afternoon at his window as he watched the knight of various honourable orders parade the street as undaunted as ever. "Had I treated her with less delicacy, she would never have risked playing the part of an innocent victim."

At that moment John announced Fritz von Ehrenberg.

The boy came in dressed in an admirably fitting summer suit. He was radiant with youth and strength, victory gleamed in his eye; a hymn of victory seemed silently singing on his lips.

"Well Fritz, you seem merry," said Niebeldingk and patted the boy's shoulder. He could not suppress a smile of sad envy.

"Don't ask me! Why shouldn't I be happy? Life is so beautiful, yes, beautiful. Only you musn't have any dealings with women. That plays the deuce with one."

"You don't know yourself how right you are," Niebeldingk sighed, looking out of the corner of an eye at the knight of several honourable orders who had now taken up his station in the shelter of the house opposite.

"Oh, but I do know it," Fritz answered. "If I could describe to you the contempt with which I regard my former mode of life ... everything is different ... different ... so much purer ... nobler ... I'm absolutely a stoic now.... And that gives one a feeling of such peace, such serenity! And I have you to thank for it, Herr von Niebeldingk."

"I don't understand that. To teach in the stoa is a new employment for me."

"Well, didn't you introduce me to that noble lady? Wasn't it you?"

"Aha," said Niebeldingk. The image of Alice, smiling a gentle reproach, arose before him.

In the midst of this silly and sordid business that had overtaken him, he had almost lost sight of her. More than a week had passed since he had crossed her threshold.

"How is the dear lady?" he asked.

"Oh, splendid," Fritz said, "just splendid."

"Have you seen her often?"

"Certainly," Fritz replied, "we're reading Marcus Aurelius together now."

"Thank heaven," Niebeldingk laughed, "I see that she's well taken care of."

He made up his mind to see her within the next hour.

Fritz who had only come because he needed to overflow to some one with the joy of life that was in him, soon started to go.

At the door he turned and said timidly and with downcast eyes.

"I have one request to make----"

"Fire away, Fritz! How much?"

"Oh, I don't need money ... I'd like to have the address of your florist ...I'd like to send to the dear lady a bunch of the ... the Indian lilies."

"What? Are you mad?" Niebeldingk cried.

"Why do you ask that?" Fritz was hurt. "May I not also send that symbol to a lady whose purity and loftiness of soul I reverence. I suppose I'm old enough!"

"I see. You're quite right. Forgive me." Niebeldingk bit his lips and gave the lad the address.

Fritz thanked him and went.

Niebeldingk gave way to his mirth and called for his hat. He wanted to go to her at once. But--for better or worse--he changed his mind, for yonder in the gateway, unabashed, stood the knight of several honourable orders.

Chapter VII

To be sure, one can't stand eternally in a gateway. Finally the knight deserted his post and vanished into a sausage shop. The hour had come when even the most glowing passion of revenge fades gently into a passion for supper.

Niebeldingk who had waited behind his curtain, half-amused, half-bored--for in the silent, distinguished street where everyone knew him a scandal was to be avoided at any cost--Niebeldingk hastened to make up for his neglect at once.

The dark fell. Here and there the street-lamps flickered through the purple air of the summer dusk....

The maid who opened the door looked at him with cool astonishment as though he were half a stranger who had the audacity to pay a call at this intimate hour.

"That means a scolding," he thought.

But he was mistaken.

Smiling quietly, Alice arose from the couch where she had been sitting by the light of a shaded lamp and stretched out her hand with all her old kindliness. The absence of the otherwise inevitable book was the only change that struck him.

"We haven't seen each other for a long time," he said, making a wretched attempt at an explanation.

"Is it so long?" she asked frankly.

"Thank you for your gentle punishment." He kissed her hand. Then he chatted, more or less at random, of disagreeable business matters, of preparations for a journey, and so forth.

"So you are going away?" she asked tensely.

The word had escaped him, he scarcely knew how. Now that he had uttered it, however, he saw very clearly that nothing better remained for him to do than to carry the casual thought into action.... Here he passed a fruitless, enervating life, slothful, restless and humiliating; at home there awaited him light, useful work, dreamless sleep, and the tonic sense of being the master.

All that, in other days, held him in Berlin, namely, this modest, clever, flexible woman had almost passed from his life. Steady neglect had done its work. If he went now, scarcely the smallest gap would be torn into the fabric of his life.

Or did it only seem so? Was she more deeply rooted in his heart than he had ever confessed even to himself? They were both silent. She stood very near him and sought to read the answer to her question in his eyes. A kind of anxious joy appeared upon her slightly worn features.

"I'm needed at home," he said at last. "It is high time for me. If you desire I'll look after your affairs too."

"Mine? Where?"

"Well, I thought we were neighbours there--more than here. Or have you forgotten the estate?"

"Let us leave aside the matter of being neighbours," she answered, "and I don't suppose that I have much voice in the management of the estate as long as--he lives. The guardians will see to that."

"But you could run down there once in a while ... in the summer for instance. Your place is always ready for you. I saw to that."

"Ah, yes, you saw to that." The wistful irony that he had so often noted was visible again.

For the first time he understood its meaning.

"She has made things too easy for me," he reflected. "I should have felt my chains. Then, too, I would have realised what I possessed in her."

But did he not still possess her? What, after all, had changed since those days of quiet companionship? Why should he think of her as lost to him?

He could not answer this question. But he felt a dull restlessness. A sense of estrangement told him: All is not here as it was.

"Since when do you live in dreams, Alice?" he asked, surveying the empty table by which he had found her.

His question had been innocent, but it seemed to carry a sting. She blushed and looked past him.

"How do you mean?"

"Good heavens, to sit all evening without books and let the light burn in vain--that was not your wont heretofore."

"Oh, that's it. Ah well, one can't be poking in books all the time. And for the past few days my eyes have been aching."

"With secret tears?" he teased.

She gave him a wide, serious look.

"With secret tears," she repeated.

"_Ah perfido_!" he trilled, in order to avoid the scene which he feared ... But he was on the wrong scent. She herself interrupted him with the question whether he would stay to supper.

He was curious to find the causes of the changes that he felt here. For that reason and also because he was not without compunction, he consented to stay.

She rang and ordered a second cover to be laid.

Louise looked at her mistress with a disapproving glance and went.

"Dear me," he laughed, "the servants are against me ... I am lost."

"You have taken to noticing such things very recently." She gave a perceptible shrug.

"When a wife tells a husband of his newly acquired habits, he is doubly lost," he answered and gave her his arm.

The silver gleamed on the table ... the tea-kettle puffed out delicate clouds ... exquisitely tinted apples, firm as in Autumn, smiled at him.

A word of admiration escaped him. And then, once more, he saw that tragic smile on her lips--sad, wistful, almost compassionate.

"My darling," he said with sudden tenderness and caressed her shoulder.

She nodded and smiled. That was all.

At table her mood was an habitual one. Perhaps she was a trifle gentler. He attributed that to his approaching departure.

She drank a glass of Madeira at the beginning of the meal, the light Rhine wine she took in long, thirsty draughts, she even touched the brandy at the meal's end.

An inner fire flared in her. He suspected that, he felt it. She had touched no food. But she permitted nothing to appear on the surface. On the contrary, the emotional warmth that she had shown earlier disappeared. The play of her thoughts grew cooler, clearer, more cutting, the longer she talked.

Twice or thrice quotations from Goethe were about to escape her, but she did not utter them. Smiling she tapped her own lips.

When he observed that she was really restraining a genuine impulse he begged her to consider the protest he had once uttered as merely a jest, perhaps even an ill-considered one. But she said: "Let be, it is as well."

They conversed, as they had often done, of the perished days of their old love. They spoke like two beings who have long conquered all the struggles of the heart and who, in the calm harbour of friendship, regard with equanimity the storms which they have weathered.

This way of speaking had gradually, and with a kind of jocular moroseness, crept into their intercourse. The exciting thing about it was the silent reservation felt by both: We know how different things could be, so soon as we desired. To-day, for the first time, this game at renunciation seemed to become serious.

"How strange!" he thought. "Here we sit who are dearest to each other in all the world and a kind of futile arrogance drives us farther and farther apart."

Alice arose.

He kissed her, as was his wont, upon hand and forehead and noted how she turned aside with a slight shiver. Then suddenly she took his head in both her hands and kissed him full on the lips with a kind of desperate eagerness.

"Ah," he cried, "what is that? It's more than I have a right to expect."

"Forgive me," she said, withdrawing herself at once. "We're poverty stricken folk and haven't much to give each other."

"After what I have just experienced, I'm inclined to believe the contrary."

But she seemed little inclined to draw the logical consequences of her action. Quietly she gave him his wonted cigarette, lit her own, and sat down in her old place. With rounded lips she blew little clouds of smoke against the table-cover.

"Whenever I regard you in this manner," he said, carefully feeling his way, "it always seems to me that you have some silent reservation, as though you were waiting for something." "It may be," she answered, blushing anew, "I sit by the way-side, like the man in the story, and think of the coming of my fate."

"Fate? What fate?"

"Ah, who can tell, dear friend? That which one foresees is no longer one's fate!"

"Perhaps it's just the other way."

She drew back sharply and looked past him in tense thoughtfulness. "Perhaps you are right," she said, with a little mysterious sigh. "It may be as you say."

He was no wiser than he had been. But since he held it beneath his dignity to assume the part of the jealous master, he abandoned the search for her secrets with a shrug. The secrets could be of no great importance. No one knew better than himself the moderateness of her desires, no lover, in calm possession of his beloved, had so little to fear as he....

They discussed their plans for the Summer. He intended to go to the North Sea in Autumn, an old affection attracted her to Thuringia. The possibility of their meeting was touched only in so far as courtesy demanded it.

And once more silence fell upon the little drawing-room. Through the twilight an old, phantastic Empire clock announced the hurrying minutes with a hoarse tick.

In other days a magical mood had often filled this room--the presage of an exquisite flame and its happy death. All that had vibrated here. Nothing remained. They had little to say to each other. That was what time had left.

He played thoughtfully with his cigarette. She stared into nothingness with great, dreamy eyes.

And suddenly she began to weep ...

He almost doubted his own perception, but the great glittering tears ran softly down her smiling face.

But he was satiated with women's tears. In the fleeting amatory adventures of the past weeks and months, he had seen so many--some genuine, some sham, all superfluous. And so instead of consoling her, he conceived a feeling of sarcasm and nausea: "Now even she carries on!"....

The idea did indeed flash into his mind that this moment might be decisive and pregnant with the fate of the future, but his horror of scenes and explanations restrained him.

Wearily he assumed the attitude of one above the storms of the soul and sought a jest with which to recall her to herself. But before he found it she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and slipped from the room.

"So much the better," he thought and lit a fresh cigarette, "If she lets her passion spend itself in silence it will pass the more swiftly."

Walking up and down he indulged in philosophic reflections concerning the useless emotionality of woman, and the duty of man not to be infected by it ... He grew quite warm in the proud consciousness of his heart's coldness.

Then suddenly--from the depth of the silence that was about him--resounded in a long-drawn, shrill, whirring voice that he had never heard--his own name.

"Rrricharrd!" it shrilled, stern and hard as the command of some paternal martinet. The voice seemed to come from subterranean depths.

He shivered and looked about. Nothing moved. There was no living soul in the next room.

"Richard!" the voice sounded a second time. This time the sound seemed but a few paces from him, but it arose from the ground as though a teasing goblin lay under his chair.

He bent over and peered into dark corners.

The mystery was solved: Joko, Alice's parrot, having secretly stolen from his quarters, sat on the rung of a chair and played the evil conscience of the house.

The tame animal stepped with dignity upon his outstretched hand and permitted itself to be lifted into the light.... Its glittering neck-feathers stood up, and while it whetted its beak on Niebeldingk's cuff-links, it repeated in a most subterranean voice: "Richard!"

And suddenly the dear feeling of belonging here, of being at home came over Niebeldingk. He had all but lost it. But its gentle power drew him on and refreshed him.

It was his right and his duty to be at home here where a dear woman lived so exclusively for him that the voice of her yearning sounded even from the tongue of the brute beast that she possessed! There was no possibility of feeling free and alien here.

"I must find her!" he thought quickly, "I musn't leave her alone another second."

He set Joko carefully on the table and sought to reach her bed-room which he had never entered by this approach.

In the door that led to the rear hall she met him. Her demeanour had its accustomed calm, her eyes were clear and dry.

"My poor, dear darling!" he cried and wanted to take her in his arms.

A strange, repelling glance met him and interrupted his beautiful emotion. Something hardened in him and he felt a new inclination to sarcasm.

"Forgive me for leaving you," she said, "one must have patience with the folly of my sex. You know that well."

And she preceded him to his old place.

Screaming with pleasure Joko flew forward to meet her, and Niebeldingk remained standing to take his leave.

She did not hold him back.

Outside it occurred to him that he hadn't told her the anecdote of Fritz and the Indian lilies.

"It's a pity," he thought, "it might have cheered her." ...

Chapter VIII

Next morning Niebeldingk sat at his desk and reflected with considerable discomfort on the experience of the previous evening. Suddenly he observed, across the street, restlessly waiting in the same doorway--the avenging spirit!

It was an opportune moment. It would distract him to make an example of the fellow. Nothing better could have happened.

He rang for John and ordered him to bring up the wretched fellow and, furthermore, to hold himself in readiness for an act of vigorous expulsion.

Five minutes passed. Then the door opened and, diffidently, but with a kind of professional dignity, the knight of several honourable orders entered the room.

Niebeldingk made rapid observations: A beardless, weatherworn old face with pointed, stiff, white brows. The little, watery eyes knew how to hide their cunning, for nothing was visible in them save an expression of wonder and consternation. The black frock coat was threadbare but clean, his linen was spotless. He wore a stock which had been the last word of fashion at the time of the July revolution.

"A sharper of the most sophisticated sort," Niebeldingk concluded.

"Before any discussion takes place," he said sharply. "I must know with whom I am dealing."

The old man drew off with considerable difficulty his torn, gray, funereal gloves and, from the depths of a greasy pocket-book, produced a card which had, evidently, passed through a good many hands.

"A sharper," Niebeldingk repeated to himself, "but on a pretty low plane." He read the card: "Kohleman, retired clerk of court." And below was printed the addition: "Knight of several orders."

"What decorations have you?" he asked.

"I have been very graciously granted the Order of the Crown, fourth class, and the general order for good behaviour."

"Sit down," Niebeldingk replied, impelled by a slight instinctive respect.

"Thank you, I'll take the liberty," the old gentleman answered and sat down on the extreme edge of a chair.

"Once on the stairs you--" he was about to say "attacked me," but he repressed the words. "I know," he began, "what your business is. And now tell me frankly: Do you think any man in the world such a fool as to contemplate marriage because a frivolous young thing whose acquaintance he made at a supper given to 'cocottes' accompanies him, in the middle of the night, to his bachelor quarters? Do you think that a reasonable proposition?"

"No," the old gentleman answered with touching honesty. "But you know it's pretty discouraging to have Meta get into that kind of a mess. I've had my suspicions for some time that that baggage is a keener, and I've often said to my sister: 'Look here, these theatrical women are no proper company for a girl--'"

"Well then," Niebeldingk exclaimed, overcome with astonishment, "if that's the case, what are you after?"

"I?" the old gentleman quavered and pointed a funereal glove at his breast, "I? Oh, dear sakes alive! I'm not after anything. Do you imagine, my dear sir, that I get any fun out of tramping up and down in front of your house on my old legs? I'd rather sit in a corner and leave strange people to their own business. But what can I do? I live in my sister's house, and I do pay her a little board, for I'd never take a present, not a penny--that was never my way. But what I pay isn't much, you know, and so I have to make myself a bit useful in the boarding-house. The ladies have little errands, you know. And they're quite nice, too, except that they get as nasty as can be if their rooms aren't promptly cleaned in the morning, and so I help with the dusting, too ... If only it weren't for my asthma ... I tell, you, asthma, my dear sir--"

He stopped for an attack of coughing choked him.

With a sudden kindly emotion Niebeldingk regarded the terrible avenger in horror of whom he had lived four mortal days. He told him to stretch his poor old legs and asked him whether he'd like a glass of Madeira.

The old gentleman's face brightened. If it would surely give no trouble he would take the liberty of accepting.

Niebeldingk rang and John entered with a grand inquisitorial air. He recoiled when he saw the monster so comfortable and, for the first time in his service, permitted himself a gentle shake of the head.

The old gentleman emptied his glass in one gulp and wiped his mouth with a brownish cotton handkerchief. Fragments of tobacco flew about. He looked so tenderly at the destroyer of his family as though he had a sneaking desire to join the enemy.

"Well, well," he began again. "What's to be done? If my sister takes something into her head.... And anyhow, I'll tell you in confidence, she is a devil. Oh deary me, what I have to put up with from her! It's no good getting into trouble with her! ... If you want to avoid any unpleasantness, I can only advise you to consent right away.... You can back out later.... But that would be the easiest way."

Niebeldingk laughed heartily.

"Yes, you can laugh," the old gentleman said sadly, "that's because you don't know my sister."

"But you know her, my dear man. And do you suppose that she may have other, that is to say, financial aims, while she----"

The old gentleman looked at him with great scared eyes.

"How do you mean?" he said and crushed the brown handkerchief in his hollow hand.

"Well, well, well," Niebeldingk quieted him and poured a reconciling second glass of wine.

But he wasn't to be bribed.

"Permit me, my dear sir," he said, "but you misunderstand me entirely.... Even if I do help my sister in the house, and even if I do go on errands, I would never have consented to go on such an one.... I said to my sister: It's marriage or nothing.... We don't go in for blackmail, of that you may be sure." "Well, my dear man," Niebeldingk laughed, "If that's the alternative, then--nothing!"

The old gentleman grew quite peaceable again.

"Goodness knows, you're quite right. But you will have unpleasantnesses, mark my word. ... And if she has to appeal to the Emperor, my sister said. And my sister--I mention it quite in confidence--my sister--"

"Is a devil, I understand."

"Exactly."

He laughed slyly as one who is getting even with an old enemy and drank, with every evidence of delight, the second glassful of wine.

Niebeldingk considered. Whether unfathomable stupidity or equally unfathomable sophistication lay at the bottom of all this--the business was a wretched one. It was just such an affair as would be dragged through every scandal mongering paper in the city, thoroughly equipped, of course, with the necessary moral decoration. He could almost see the heavy headlines: Rascality of a Nobleman.

"Yes, yes, my dear fellow," he said, and patted the terrible enemy's shoulder, "I tell you it's a dog's life. If you can avoid it any way--never go in for fast living."

The old gentleman shook his gray head sadly.

"That's all over," he declared, "but twenty years ago--" Niebeldingk cut short the approaching confidences.

"Well, what's going to happen now?" he asked. "And what will your sister do when you come home and announce my refusal?"

"I'll tell you, Baron. In fact, my sister required that I should tell you, because that is to--" he giggled--"that is to have a profound effect. We've got a nephew, I must tell you, who's a lieutenant in the army. Well, he is to come at once and challenge you to a duel.... Well, now, a duel is always a pretty nasty piece of business. First, there's the scandal, and then, one might get hurt. And so my sister thought that you'd rather----"

"Hold on, my excellent friend," said Niebeldingk and a great weight rolled from his heart. "You have an officer in your family? That's splendid ... I couldn't ask anything better ... You wire him at once and tell him that I'll be at home three days running and ready to give him the desired explanations. I'm sorry for the poor fellow for being mixed up in such a stupid mess, but I can't help him."

"Why do you feel sorry for him?" the old gentleman asked. "He's as good a marksman as you are."

"Assuredly," Niebeldingk returned. "Assuredly a better one.... Only it won't come to that."

He conducted his visitor with great ceremony into the outer hall.

The latter remained standing for a moment in the door. He grasped Niebeldingk's hand with overflowing friendliness.

"My dear baron, you have been so nice to me and so courteous. Permit me, in return, to offer you an old man's counsel: Be more careful about flowers!"

"What flowers?"

"Well, you sent a great, costly bunch of them. That's what first attracted my sister's attention. And when my sister gets on the track of anything, well!" ...

He shook with pleasure at the sly blow he had thus delivered, drew those funereal gloves of his from the crown of his hat and took his leave.

"So it was the fault of the Indian lilies," Niebeldingk thought, looking after the queer old knight with an amused imprecation. That gentleman, enlivened by the wine he had taken, pranced with a new flexibility along the side-walk. "Like the count in Don Juan," Niebeldingk thought, "only newly equipped and modernised."

The intervention of the young officer placed the whole affair upon an intelligible basis. It remained only to treat it with entire seriousness. Niebeldingk, according to his promise, remained at home until sunset for three boresome days. On the morning of the fourth he wrote a letter to the excellent old gentleman telling him that he was tired of waiting and requesting an immediate settlement of the business in question. Thereupon he received the following answer:

"SIR:--

In the name of my family I declare to you herewith that I give you over to the well-deserved contempt of your fellowmen. A man who can hesitate to restore the honour of a loving and yielding girl is not worthy of an alliance with our family. Hence we now sever any further connection with you.

With that measure of esteem which you deserve,

I am,

KOHLEMAN, Retired Clerk of Court.

Knight S.H.O.

P.S.

Best regards. Don't mind all that talk. The duel came to nothing. Our little lieutenant besought us not to ruin him and asked that his name be not mentioned. He has left town."

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, Niebeldingk threw the letter aside.

Now that the affair was about to float into oblivion, he became aware of the fact that it had weighed most heavily upon him.

And he began to feel ashamed.

He, a man who, by virtue of his name and of his wealth and, if he would be bold, by virtue of his intellect, was able to live in some noble and distinguished way--he passed his time with banalities that were half sordid and half humorous. These things had their place. Youth might find them not unfruitful of experience. They degraded a man of forty.

If these things filled his life to-day, then the years of training and slow maturing had surely gone for nothing. And what would become of him if he carried these interests into his old age? His schoolmates were masters of the great sciences, distinguished servants of the government, influential politicians. They toiled in the sweat of their brows and harvested the fruits of their youth's sowing.

He strove to master these discomforting thoughts, but every moment found him more defenceless against them.

And shame changed into disgust.

To divert himself he went out into the streets and landed, finally, in the rooms of his club. Here he was asked concerning his latest adventure. Only a certain respect which his personality inspired saved him from unworthy jests. And in this poverty-stricken world, where the very lees of experience amounted to a sensation--here he wasted his days.

It must not last another week, not another day. So much suddenly grew clear to him.

He hurried away. Upon the streets brooded the heat of early summer. Masses of human beings, hot but happy, passed him in silent activity.

What was he to do?

He must marry: that admitted of no doubt. In the glow of his own hearth he must begin a new and more tonic life.

Marry? But whom? A worn out heart can no longer be made to beat more swiftly at the sight of some slim maiden. The senses might yet be stirred, but that is all.

Was he to haunt watering-places and pay court to mothers on the man-hunt in order to find favour in their daughters' eyes? Was he to travel from estate to estate and alienate the affection of young chatelaines from their favourite lieutenants?

Impossible!

He went home hopelessly enough and drowsed away the hours of the afternoon behind drawn blinds on a hot couch.

Toward evening the postman brought a letter--in Alice's hand. Alice! How could he have forgotten her! His first duty should have been to see her.

He opened the envelope, warmly grateful for her mere existence.

"DEAR FRIEND:--

As you will probably not find time before you leave the city to bid me farewell in person. I beg you to return to me a certain key which I gave into your keeping some years ago. You have no need of it and it worries me to have it lying about.

Don't think that I am at all angry. My friendship and my gratitude are yours, however far and long we may be separated. When, some day, we meet again, we will both have become different beings. With many blessings upon your way,

ALICE."

He struck his forehead like a man who awakens from an obscene dream.

Where was his mind? He was about to go in search of that which was so close at hand, so richly his own!

Where else in all the world could he find a woman so exquisitely tempered to his needs, so intimately responsive to his desires, one who would lead him into the darker land of matrimony through meadows of laughing flowers?

To be sure, there was her coolness of temper, her learning, her strange restlessness. But was not all that undergoing a change? Had he not found her sunk in dreams? And her tears? And her kiss?

Ungrateful wretch that he was!

He had sought a home and not thought of the parrot who screamed out his name in her dear dwelling. There was a parrot like that in the world--and he wandered foolishly abroad. What madness! What baseness!

He would go to her at once.

But no! A merry thought struck him and a healing one.

He took the key from the wall and put it into his pocket.

He would go to her--at midnight.

Chapter IX.

He had definitely abandoned his club, the theatres were closed, the restaurants were deserted, his brother's family was in the country. It was not easy to pass the evening with that great resolve in his heart and that small key in his pocket.

Until ten he drifted about under the foliage of the Tiergarten. He listened to the murmur of couples who thronged the dark benches, regarded those who were quietly walking in the alleys and found himself, presently, in that stream of humanity which is drawn irresistibly toward the brightly illuminated pleasure resorts.

He was moved and happy at once. For the first time in years he felt himself to be a member of the family of man, a humbly serving brother in the commonweal of social purpose.

His time of proud, individualistic morality was over: the ever-blessing institution of the family was about to gather him to its hospitable bosom.

To be sure, his wonted scepticism was not utterly silenced. But he drove it away with a feeling of delighted comfort. He could have shouted a blessing to the married couples in search of air, he could have given a word of fatherly advice to the couples on the benches: "Children, commit no indiscretions--marry!"

And when he thought of her! A mild and peaceable tenderness of which he had never thought himself capable welled up from his and heart.... Wide gardens of Paradise seemed to open, gardens with secret grottos and shady corners. And upon one of the palm-trees there sat Joko--amiable beast--and said: "Rrricharrrd!"

He went over the coming scene in his imagination again and again: Her little cry of panic when he would enter the dark room and then his whispered reassurance: "It is I, my darling. I have come back to stay for ever and ever."

And then happiness, gentle and heart-felt.

If a divorce was necessary, the relatives of her husband would probably succeed in divesting her of most of the property. What did it matter to either of them? Was he not rich and was she not sure of him? If need were, he could, with one stroke of the pen, repay her threefold all that she might lose. But, indeed, these reflections were quite futile. For when two people are so welded together in their souls, their earthly possessions need no separation. From ten until half past eleven he sat in a corner of the Cafe Bauer and read the paper of his native province which, usually, he never looked at. With childlike delight he read into the local notices and advertisements things pertinent to his future life.

Bremsel, the delicatessen man in a neighbouring town advertised fresh crabs. And Alice liked them. "Splendid," he thought "we won't have to bring them from far." And suddenly he himself felt an appetite for the shell-fish, so thoroughly had he lived himself into his vision of domestic felicity.

At twenty-five minutes of twelve he paid for his chartreuse and set out on foot. He had time to spare and he did not want to cause the unavoidable disturbance of a cab's stopping at her door.

The house, according to his hope, was dark and silent.

With beating heart he drew forth the key which consisted of two collapsible parts. One part was for the house door, the other for a door in her bed-room that led to a separate entrance. He had himself chosen the apartment with this advantage in view.

He passed the lower hall unmolested and reached the creaking stairs which he had always hated. And as he mounted he registered an oath to pass this way no more. He would not thus jeopardise the fair fame of his betrothed.

It would be bad enough if he had to rap, in case the night latch was drawn....

The outer door, at least, offered no difficulty. He touched it and it swung loose on its hinges.

For a moment the mad idea came into his head that--in answer to her letter--Alice might have foreseen the possibility of his coming.... He was just about to test, by a light pressure, the knob of the inner door when, coming from the bed-room, a muffled sound of speech reached his ear.

One voice was Alice's: the other--his breath stopped. It was not the maid's. He knew it well. It was the voice of Fritz von Ehrenberg.

It was over then--for him.... And again and again he murmured: "It's all over."

He leaned weakly against the wall.

Then he listened.

This woman who could not yield with sufficient fervour to the abandon of passionate speech and action--this was Alice, his Alice, with her fine sobriety, her philosophic clearness of mind.

And that young fool whose mouth she closed with long kisses of gratitude for his folly--did he realise the blessedness which had fallen to the lot of his crude youth? It was over ... all over.

And he was so worn, so passionless, so autumnal of soul, that he could smile wearily in the midst of his pain.

Very carefully he descended the creaking stairs, locked the door of the house and stood on the street--still smiling.

It was over ... all over.

Her future was trodden into the mire, hers and his own.

And in this supreme moment he grew cruelly aware of his crimes against her.

All her love, all her being during these years had been but one secret prayer: "Hold me, do not break me, do not desert me!"

He had been deaf. He had given her a stone for bread, irony for love, cold doubt for warm, human trust! And in the end he had even despised her because she had striven, with touching faith, to form herself according to his example.

It was all fatally clear--now.

Her contradictions, her lack of feeling, her haughty scepticism--all that had chilled and estranged him had been but a dutiful reflection of his own being.

Need he be surprised that the last remnant of her lost and corrupted youth rose in impassioned rebellion against him and, thinking to save itself, hurled itself to destruction?

He gave one farewell glance to the dark, silent house--the grave of the fairest hopes of all his life. Then he set out upon long, dreary, aimless wandering through the endless, nocturnal streets.

Like shadows the shapes of night glided by him.

Shy harlots--loud roysterers--benzin flames--more harlots--and here and there one lost in thought even as he.

An evil odour, as of singed horses' hoofs, floated over the city..... The dust whirled under the street-cleaning machines.

The world grew silent. He was left almost alone.....

Then the life of the awakening day began to stir. A sleepy dawn crept over the roofs....

It was the next morning.

There would be no "next mornings" for him. That was over.

Let others send Indian lilies!

THE PURPOSE

Chapter I.

It was a blazing afternoon, late in July. The Cheruskan fraternity entered Ellerntal in celebration of their mid-summer festivity. They had let the great wagon stand at the outskirts of the village and now marched up its street in well-formed procession, proud and vain as a company of Schuetzen before whom all the world bows down once a year.

First came the regimental band of the nearest garrison, dressed in civilian's clothes--then, under the vigilance of two brightly attired freshmen, the blue, white and golden banner of the fraternity, next the officers accompanied by other freshmen, and finally the active members in whom the dignity, decency and fighting strength of the fraternity were embodied. A gay little crowd of elderly gentlemen, ladies and guests followed in less rigid order. Last came, as always and everywhere, the barefoot children of the village. The procession came to a halt in front of the Prussian Eagle, a long-drawn single story structure of frame. The newly added dance hall with its three great windows protruded loftily above the house.

The banner was lowered, the horns of the band gave wild, sharp signals to which no one attended, and Pastor Rhode, a sedate man of fifty dressed in the scarf and slashed cap of the order, stepped from the inn door to pronounce the address of welcome. At this moment it happened that one of the two banner bearers who had stood at the right and left of the flag with naked foils, rigid as statues, slowly tilted over forward and buried his face in the green sward.

This event naturally put an immediate end to the ceremony. Everybody, men and women, thronged around the fallen youth and were quickly pushed back by the medical fraternity men who were present in various stages of professional development.

The medical wisdom of this many-headed council culminated in the cry: "A glass of water!"

Immediately a young girl--hot-eyed and loose-haired, exquisite in the roundedness of half maturity--rushed out of the door and handed a glass to the gentlemen who had turned the fainting lad on his back and were loosening scarf and collar.

He lay there, in the traditional garb of the fraternity, like a young cavalry man of the time of the Great Elector--with his blue, gold-braided doublet, close-fitting breeches of white leather and mighty boots whose flapping tops swelled out over his firm thighs. He couldn't be above eighteen or nineteen, long and broad though he was, with his cheeks of milk and blood, that showed no sign of down, no duelling scar. You would have thought him some mother's pet, had there not been a sharp line of care that ran mournfully from the half-open lips to the chin.

The cold water did its duty. Sighing, the lad opened his eyes--two pretty blue boy's eyes, long lashed and yet a little empty of expression as though life had delayed giving them the harder glow of maturity.

These eyes fell upon the young girl who stood there, with hands pressed to her heaving bosom, in an ecstatic desire to help.

"Where can we carry him?" asked one of the physicians.

"Into my room," she cried, "I'll show you the way."

Eight strong hands took hold and two minutes later the boy lay on the flowered cover of her bed. It was far too short for him, but it stood, soft and comfortable, hidden by white mull curtains in a corner of her simple room.

He was summoned back to full consciousness, tapped, auscultated and examined. Finally he confessed with a good deal of hesitation that his right foot hurt him a bit--that was all.

"Are the boots your own, freshie?" asked one of the physicians.

He blushed, turned his gaze to the wall and shook his head.

Everyone smiled.

"Well, then, off with the wretched thing."

But all exertion of virile strength was in vain. The boot did not budge. Only a low moan of suffering came from the patient.

"There's nothing to be done," said one, "little miss, let's have a bread-knife."

Anxious and with half-folded hands she had stood behind the doctors. Now she rushed off and brought the desired implement.

"But you're not going to hurt him?" she asked with big, beseeching eyes.

"No, no, we're only going to cut his leg off," jested one of the by-standers and took the knife from her clinging fingers.

Two incisions, two rents along the shin--the leather parted. A steady surgeon's hand guided the knife carefully over the instep. At last the flesh appeared--bloody, steel-blue and badly swollen.

"Freshie, you idiot, you might have killed yourself," said the surgeon and gave the patient a paternal nudge. "And now, little miss, hurry--sugar of lead bandages till evening."

Chapter II.

Her name was Antonie. She was the inn-keeper Wiesner's only daughter and managed the household and kitchen because her mother had died in the previous year.

His name was Robert Messerschmidt. He was a physician's son and a student of medicine. He hoped to fight his way into full fraternity membership by the beginning of the next semester. This last detail was, at present, the most important of his life and had been confided to her at the very beginning of their acquaintanceship.

Youth is in a hurry. At four o'clock their hands were intertwined. At five o'clock their lips found each other. From six on the bandages were changed more rarely. Instead they exchanged vows of eternal fidelity. At eight a solemn betrothal took place. And when, at ten o'clock, swaying slightly and mellow of mood, the physicians reappeared in order to put the patient to bed properly, their wedding-day had been definitely set for the fifth anniversary of that day. Next morning the procession went on to celebrate in some other picturesque locality the festival of the breakfast of "the morning after."

Toni had run up on the hill which ascended, behind her father's house, toward the high plateau of the river-bank. With dry but burning eyes she looked after the wagons which gradually vanished in the silvery sand of the road and one of which carried away into the distance her life's whole happiness.

To be sure, she had fallen in love with everyone whom she had met. This habit dated from her twelfth, nay, from her tenth year. But this time it was different, oh, so different. This time it was like an axe-blow from which one doesn't arise. Or like the fell disease--consumption--which had dragged her mother to the grave.

She herself was more like her father, thick-set and sturdy.

She had also inherited his calculating and planning nature. With tough tenacity he could sacrifice years of earning and saving and planning to acquire farms and meadows and orchards. Thus the girl could meditate and plan her fate which, until yesterday, had been fluid as water but which to-day lay definitely anchored in the soul of a stranger lad.

Her education had been narrow. She knew the little that an old governess and a comfortable pastor could teach. But she read whatever she could get hold of--from the tattered "pony" to Homer which a boy friend had loaned her, to the most horrible penny-dreadfuls which were her father's delight in his rare hours of leisure.

And she assimilated what she read and adapted it to her own fate. Thus her imagination was familiar with happiness, with delusion, with crime....

She knew that she was beautiful. If the humility of her play-fellows had not assured her of this fact, she would have been enlightened by the long glances and jesting admiration of her father's guests.

Her father was strict. He interfered with ferocity if a traveller jested with her too intimately. Nevertheless he liked to have her come into the inn proper and slip, smiling and curtsying, past the wealthier guests. It was not unprofitable.

Upon his short, fleshy bow-legs, with his suspiciously calculating blink, with his avarice and his sharp tongue, he stood between her and the world, permitting only so much of it to approach her as seemed, at a given moment, harmless and useful.

His attitude was fatal to any free communication with her beloved. He opened and read every letter that she had ever received. Had she ventured to call for one at the post-office, the information would have reached him that very day.

The problem was how to deceive him without placing herself at the mercy of some friend.

She sat down in the arbour from which, past the trees of the orchard and the neighbouring river, one had a view of the Russian forests, and put the problem to her seventeen-year old brain. And while the summer wind played with the green fruit on the boughs and the white herons spread their gleaming wings over the river, she thought out a plan--the first of many by which she meant to rivet her beloved for life.

On the same afternoon she asked her father's permission to invite the daughter of the county-physician to visit her.

"Didn't know you were such great friends," he said, surprised.

"Oh, but we are," she pretended to be a little hurt. "We were received into the Church at the same time."

With lightning-like rapidity he computed the advantages that might result from such a visit. The county-seat was four miles distant and if the societies of veterans and marksmen in whose committees the doctor was influential could be persuaded to come hither for their outings.... The girl was cordially invited and arrived a week later. She was surprised and touched to find so faithful a friend in Toni who, when they were both boarding with Pastor Rhode, had played her many a sly trick.

Two months later the girl, in her turn, invited Toni to the city whither she had never before been permitted to go alone and so the latter managed to receive her lover's first letter.

What he wrote was discouraging enough. His father was ill, hence the excellent practice was gliding into other hands and the means for his own studies were growing narrow. If things went on so he might have to give up his university course and take to anything to keep his mother and sister from want.

This prospect did not please Toni. She was so proud of him. She could not bear to have him descend in the social scale for the sake of bread and butter. She thought and thought how she could help him with money, but nothing occurred to her. She had to be content with encouraging him and assuring him that her love would find ways and means for helping him out of his difficulties.

She wrote her letters at night and jumped out of the window in order to drop them secretly into the pillar box. It was months before she could secure an answer. His father was better, but life in the fraternity was very expensive, and it was a very grave question whether he had not better resign the scarf which he had just gained and study on as a mere "barb."

In Toni's imagination the picture of her beloved was brilliantly illuminated by the glory of the tricoloured fraternity scarf, his desire for it had become so ardently her own, that she could not bear the thought of him--his yearning satisfied--returning to the gray commonplace garb of Philistia. And so she wrote him.

Spring came and Toni matured to statelier maidenhood. The plump girl, half-child, droll and naive, grew to be a thoughtful, silent young woman, secretive and very sure of her aims. She condescended to the guests and took no notice of the desperate admiration which surrounded her. Her glowing eyes looked into emptiness, her infinitely tempting mouth smiled carelessly at friends and strangers.

In May Robert's father died.

She read it in one of the papers that were taken at the inn, and immediately it became clear to her that her whole future was at stake. For if he was crushed now by the load of family cares, if hope were taken from him, no thought of her or her love would be left. Only if she could redeem her promises and help him practically could she hope to keep him. In the farthest corner of a rarely opened drawer lay her mother's jewels which were some day to be hers--brooches and rings, a golden chain, and a comb set with rubies which had found its way--heaven knows how--into the simple inn.

Without taking thought she stole the whole and sent it as merchandise--not daring to risk the evidence of registration--to help him in his studies. The few hundred marks that the jewellery would bring would surely keep him until the end of the semester ... but what then? ...

And again she thought and planned all through the long, hot nights.

Pastor Rhode's eldest son, a frail, tall junior who followed her, full of timid passion, came home from college for the spring vacation. In the dusk he crept around the inn as had been his wont for years.

This time he had not long to wait.

How did things go at college? Badly. Would he enter the senior class at Michaelmas? Hardly. Then she would have to be ashamed of him, and that would be a pity: she liked him too well.

The slim lad writhed under this exquisite torture. It wasn't his fault. He had pains in his chest, and growing pains. And all that.

She unfolded her plan.

"You ought to have a tutor during the long vacation, Emil, to help you work."

"Papa can do that."

"Oh, Papa is busy. You ought to have a tutor all to yourself, a student or something like that. If you're really fond of me ask your Papa to engage one. Perhaps he'll get a young man from his own fraternity with whom he can chat in the evening. You will ask, won't you? I don't like people who are conditioned in their studies."

That same night a letter was sent to her beloved.

"Watch the frat. bulletin! Our pastor is going to look for a tutor for his boy. See to it that you get the position. I'm longing to see you."

Chapter III

Once more it was late July--exactly a year after those memorable events--and he sat in the stage-coach and took off his crape-hung cap to her. His face was torn by fresh scars and diagonally across his breast the blue white golden scarf was to be seen.

She grasped the posts of the fence with both hands and felt that she would die if she could not have him.

Upon that evening she left the house no more, although for two hours he walked the dusty village street, with Emil, but also alone. But on the next evening she stood behind the fence. Their hands found each other across the obstacle.

"Do you sleep on the ground-floor?" she asked whispering.

"Yes."

"Does the dog still bark when he sees you."

"I don't know, I'm afraid so."

"When you've made friends with him so that he won't bark when you get out of the window, then come to the arbour behind our orchard. I'll wait for you every night at twelve. But don't mind that. Don't come till you're sure of the dog."

For three long nights she sat on the wooden bench of the arbour until the coming of dawn and stared into the bluish dusk that hid the village as in a cloak. From time to time the dogs bayed. She could distinguish the bay of the pastor's collie. She knew his hoarse voice. Perhaps he was barring her beloved's way....

At last, during the fourth night, when his coming was scarcely to be hoped for, uncertain steps dragged up the hill.

She did not run to meet him. She crouched in the darkest corner of the arbour and tasted, intensely blissful, the moments during which he felt his way through the foliage.

Then she clung to his neck, to his lips, demanding and according all--rapt to the very peaks of life....

They were together nightly. Few words passed between them. She scarcely knew how he looked. For not even a beam of the moon could penetrate the broad-leaved foliage, and at the peep of dawn they separated. She might have lain in the arms of a stranger and not known the difference.

And not only during their nightly meetings, but even by day they slipt through life-like shadows. One day the pastor came to the inn for a glass of beer and chatted with other gentlemen. She heard him.

"I don't know what's the matter with that young fellow," he said. "He does his duty and my boy is making progress. But he's like a stranger from another world. He sits at the table and scarcely sees us. He talks and you have the feeling that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Either he's anaemic or he writes poetry."

She herself saw the world through a blue veil, heard the voices of life across an immeasurable distance and felt hot, alien shivers run through her enervated limbs.

The early Autumn approached and with it the day of his departure. At last she thought of discussing the future with him which, until then, like all else on earth, had sunk out of sight.

His mother, he told her, meant to move to Koenigsberg and earn her living by keeping boarders. Thus there was at least a possibility of his continuing his studies. But he didn't believe that he would be able to finish. His present means would soon be exhausted and he had no idea where others would come from.

All that he told her in the annoyed and almost tortured tones of one long weary of hope who only staggers on in fear of more vital degradation.

With flaming words she urged him to be of good courage. She insisted upon such resources as--however frugal--were, after all, at hand, and calculated every penny. She shrugged her shoulders at his gratitude for that first act of helpfulness. If only there were something else to be taken. But whence and how? Her suspicious father would have observed any shortage in his till at once and would have had the thief discovered.

The great thing was to gain time. Upon her advice he was to leave Koenigsberg with its expensive fraternity life and pass the winter in Berlin. The rest had to be left to luck and cunning.

In a chill, foggy September night they said farewell. Shivering they held each other close. Their hearts were full of the confused hopes which they themselves had kindled, not because there was any ground for hope, but because without it one cannot live.

And a few weeks later everything came to an end.

For Toni knew of a surety that she would be a mother....

Chapter IV.

Into the river!

For that her father would put her in the street was clear. It was equally clear what would become of her in that case....

But no, not into the river! Why was her young head so practised in skill and cunning, if it was to bow helplessly under the first severe onslaught of fate? What was the purpose of those beautiful long nights but to brood upon plans and send far thoughts out toward shining aims?

No, she would not run into the river. That dear wedding-day in five, nay, in four years, was lost anyhow. But the long time could be utilised so cleverly that her beloved could be dragged across the abyss of his fate.

First, then, she must have a father for her child. He must not be clever. He must not be strong of will. Nor young, for youth makes demands. ... Nor well off, for he who is certain of himself desires freedom of choice.

Her choice fell upon a former inn-keeper, a down-hearted man of about fifty, moist of eye, faded, with greasy black hair.... He had failed in business some years before and now sat around in the inn, looking for a job....

To this her father did not object. For that man's condition was an excellent foil to his own success and prosperity and thus he was permitted, at times, to stay a week in the house where, otherwise, charity was scarcely at home.

Her plan worked well. On the first day she lured him silently on. On the second he responded. On the third she turned sharply and rebuked him. On the fourth she forgave him. On the fifth she met him in secret. On the sixth he went on a journey, conscience smitten for having seduced her....

That very night--for there was no time to be lost--she confessed with trembling and blushing to her father that she was overcome by an unconquerable passion for Herr Weigand. As was to be expected she was driven from the door with shame and fury.

During the following weeks she went about bathed in tears. Her father avoided her. Then, when the right moment seemed to have come, she made a second and far more difficult confession. This time her tremours and her blushes were real, her tears were genuine for her father used a horse-whip.... But when, that night, Toni sat on the edge of her bed and bathed the bloody welts on her body, she knew that her plan would succeed.

And, to be sure, two days later Herr Weigand returned--a little more faded, a little more hesitant, but altogether, by no means unhappy. He was invited into her father's office for a long discussion. The result was that the two lovers fell into each others' arms while her father, trembling with impotent rage, hurled at them the fragments of a crushed cigar.

The banns were proclaimed immediately after the betrothal, and a month later Herr Weigand, in his capacity of son-in-law, could take possession of the same garret which he had inhabited as an impecunious guest. This arrangement, however, was not a permanent one. An inn was to be rented for the young couple--with her father's money.

Toni, full of zeal and energy, took part in every new undertaking, travelled hither and thither, considered prospects and dangers, but always withdrew again at the last moment in order to await a fairer opportunity.

But she was utterly set upon the immediate furnishing of the new home. She went to Koenigsberg and had long sessions with furniture dealers and tradesmen of all kinds. On account of her delicate condition she insisted that she could only travel on the upholstered seats of the second class. She charged her father accordingly and in reality travelled fourth class and sat for hours between market-women and Polish Jews in order to save a few marks. In the accounts she rendered heavy meals were itemized, strengthening wines, stimulating cordials. As a matter of fact, she lived on dried slices of bread which, before leaving home, she hid in her trunk.

She did not disdain the saving of a tram car fare, although the rebates which she got on the furniture ran into the hundreds.

All that she sent jubilantly to her lover in Berlin, assured that he was provided for some months.

Thus the great misfortune had finally resulted in a blessing. For, without these unhoped for resources, he must have long fallen by the way-side.

Months passed. Her furnishings stood in a storage warehouse, but the house in which they were to live was not yet found.

When she felt that her hour had come--her father and husband thought it far off--she redoubled the energy of her travels, seeking, preferably, rough and ribbed roads which other women in her condition were wont to shun.

And thus, one day, in a springless vehicle, two miles distant from the county-seat, the pains of labour came upon her. She steeled every nerve and had herself carried to the house of the county-physician whose daughter was now tenderly attached to her.

There she gave birth to a girl child which announced its equivocal arrival in this world lustily.

The old doctor, into whose house this confusion had suddenly come, stood by her bed-side, smiling good-naturedly. She grasped him with both hands, terror in her eyes and in her voice.

"Dear, dear doctor! The baby was born too soon, wasn't it?"

The doctor drew back and regarded her long and earnestly. Then his smile returned and his kind hand touched her hair.

"Yes, it is as you say. The baby's nails are not fully developed and its weight is slightly below normal. It's all on account of your careless rushing about. Surely the child came too soon."

And he gave her the proper certification of the fact which protected her from those few people who might consider themselves partakers of her secret. For the opinion of people in general she cared little. So strong had she grown through guilt and silence.

And she was a child of nineteen! ...

Chapter V.

When Toni had arisen from her bed of pain she found the place which she and her husband had been seeking for months with surprising rapidity. The "Hotel Germania," the most reputable hotel in the county-seat itself was for rent. Its owner had recently died. It was palatial compared to her father's inn. There were fifteen rooms for guests, a tap-room, a wine-room, a grocery-shop and a livery-stable.

Weigand, intimidated by misfortune, had never even hoped to aspire to such heights of splendour. Even now he could only grasp the measure of his happiness by calculating enormous profits. And he did this with peculiar delight. For, since the business was to be run in the name of Toni's father, his own creditors could not touch him.

When they had moved in and the business began to be straightened out, Weigand proved himself in flat contradiction of his slack and careless character, a tough and circumspect man of business. He knew the whereabouts of every penny and was not inclined to permit his wife to make random inroads upon his takings.

Toni, who had expected to be undisputed mistress of the safe saw herself cheated of her dearest hopes, for the time approached when the savings made on the purchase of her furniture must necessarily be exhausted.

And again she planned and wrestled through the long, warm nights while her husband, whose inevitable proximity she bore calmly, snored with the heaviness of many professional "treats."

One day she said to him: "A few pennies must be put by for Amanda." That was the name of the little girl who flourished merrily in her cradle. "You must assign some little profits to me."

"What can I do?" he asked. "For the present everything belongs to the old man."

"I know what I'd like," she went on, smiling dreamily, "I'd like to have all the profits on the sale of champagne."

He laughed heartily. There wasn't much call for champagne in the little county-seat. At most a few bottles were sold on the emperor's birthday or when, once in a long while, a flush commercial traveller wanted to regale a recalcitrant customer.

And so Weigand fell in with what he thought a mere mood and assented.

Toni at once made a trip to Koenigsberg and bought all kinds of phantastic decorations--Chinese lanterns, gilt fans, artificial flowers, gay vases and manicoloured lamp-shades. With all these things she adorned the little room that lay behind the room in which the most distinguished townspeople were wont to drink their beer. And so the place with veiled light and crimson glow looked more like a mysterious oriental shrine than the sitting-room of an honest Prussian inn-keeper's wife.

She sat evening after evening in this phantastic room. She brought her knitting and awaited the things that were to come.

The gentlemen who drank in the adjoining room, the judges, physicians, planters--all the bigwigs of a small town, in short--soon noticed the magical light that glimmered through the half-open door whenever Weigand was obliged to pass from the public rooms into his private dwelling. And the men grew to be curious, the more so as the inn-keeper's young wife, of whose charms many rumours were afloat, had never yet been seen by any.

One evening, when the company was in an especially hilarious mood, the men demanded stormily to see the mysterious room.

Weigand hesitated. He would have to ask his wife's permission. He returned with the friendly message that the gentlemen were welcome. Hesitant, almost timid, they entered as if crossing the threshold of some house of mystery.

There stood--transfigured by the glow of coloured lamps--the shapely young woman with the alluring glow in her eyes, and her lips that were in the form of a heart. She gave each a secretly quivering hand and spoke a few soft words that seemed to distinguish him from the others. Then, still timid and modest, she asked them to be seated and begged for permission to serve a glass of champagne in honour of the occasion.

It is not recorded who ordered the second bottle. It may have been the very fat Herr von Loffka, or the permanently hilarious judge. At all events the short visit of the gentlemen came to an end at three o'clock in the morning with wild intoxication and a sale of eighteen bottles of champagne, of which half bore French labels.

Toni resisted all requests for a second invitation to her sanctum. She first insisted on the solemn assurance that the gentlemen would respect her presence and bring neither herself nor her house into ill-repute. At last came the imperial county-counsellor himself--a wealthy bachelor of fifty with the manners of an injured lady killer. He came to beg for himself and the others and she dared not refuse any longer.

The champagne festivals continued. With this difference: that Toni, whenever the atmosphere reached a certain point of heated intoxication, modestly withdrew to her bed-room. Thus she succeeded not only in holding herself spotless but in being praised for her retiring nature.

But she kindled a fire in the heads of these dissatisfied University men who deemed themselves banished into a land of starvation, and in the senses of the planters' sons. And this fire burned on and created about her an atmosphere of madly fevered desire....

Finally it became the highest mark of distinction in the little town, the sign of real connoisseurship in life, to have drunk a bottle of champagne with "Germania," as they called her, although she bore greater resemblance to some swarthier lady of Rome. Whoever was not admitted to her circle cursed his lowliness and his futile life.

Of course, in spite of all precautions, it could not but be that her reputation suffered. The daughter of the county-physician began to avoid her, the wives of social equals followed suit. But no one dared accuse her of improper relations with any of her adorers. It was even known that the county-counsellor, desperate over her stern refusals, was urging her to get a divorce from her husband and marry him. No one suspected, of course, that she had herself spread this rumour in order to render pointless the possible leaking out of improprieties....

Nor did any one dream that a bank in Koenigsberg transmitted, in her name, monthly cheques to Berlin that sufficed amply to help an ambitious medical student to continue his work.

The news which she received from her beloved was scanty.

In order to remain in communication with him she had thought out a subtle method.

The house of every tradesman or business man in the provinces is flooded with printed advertisements from Berlin which pour out over the small towns and the open country. Of this printed matter, which is usually thrown aside unnoticed, Toni gathered the most voluminous examples, carefully preserved the envelopes, and sent them to Robert. Her husband did not notice of course that the same advertising matter came a second time nor that faint, scarce legible pencil marks picked out words here and there which, when read consecutively, made complete sense and differed very radically from the message which the printed slips were meant to convey....

Years passed. A few ship-wrecked lives marked Toni's path, a few female slanders against her were avenged by the courts. Otherwise nothing of import took place.

And in her heart burned with never-lessening glow the one great emotion which always supplied fuel to her will, which lent every action a pregnant significance and furnished absolution for every crime.

In the meantime Amanda grew to be a blue-eyed, charming child--gentle and caressing and the image of the man of whose love she was the impassioned gift.

But Fate, which seems to play its gigantic pranks upon men in the act of punishing them, brought it to pass that the child seemed also to bear some slight resemblance to the stranger who, bowed and servile, stupidly industrious, sucking cigars, was to be seen at her mother's side.

Never was father more utterly devoted to the fruit of his loins than this gulled fellow to the strange child to whom the mother did not even--by kindly inactivity--give him a borrowed right. The more carefully she sought to separate the child from him, the more adoringly and tenaciously did he cling to it.

With terror and rage Toni was obliged to admit to herself that no sum would ever suffice to make Weigand agree to a divorce that separated him definitely from the child. And dreams and visions, transplanted into her brain from evil books, filled Toni's nights with the glitter of daggers and the stain of flowing blood. And fate seemed to urge on the day when these dreams must take on flesh....

One day she found in the waste-paper basket which she searched carefully after every mail-delivery, an advertisement which commended to the buying public a new make of type-writer.

"Many public institutions," thus the advertisement ran, "use our well tried machines in their offices, because these machines will bear the most rigid examination. Their reputation has crossed the ocean. The Chilean ministry has just ordered a dozen of our 'Excelsiors' by cable. Thus successfully does our invention spread over the world. And yet its victorious progress is by no means completed. Even in Japan--" and so on.

If one looked at this stuff very carefully, one could observe that certain words were lightly marked in pencil. And if one read these words consecutively, the following sentence resulted:

"Public--examination--just--successfully--completed."

From this day on the room with the veiled lamps remained closed to her eager friends. From this day on the generous county-counsellor saw that his hopes were dead....

Chapter VI.

How was the man to be disposed of?

An open demand for divorce would have been stupid, for it would have thrown a very vivid suspicion upon any later and more drastic attempt.

Weigand's walk and conversation were blameless. Her one hope consisted in catching him in some chance infidelity. The desire for change, she reasoned, the allurement of forbidden fruit, must inflame even this wooden creature.

She had never, hitherto, paid the slightest attention to the problem of waitresses. Now she travelled to Koenigsberg and hired the handsomest women to be found in the employment bureaus. They came, one after another, a feline Polish girl, a smiling, radiantly blond child of Sweden--a Venus, a Germania--this time a genuine one. Next came a pretended Circassian princess. And they all wandered off again, and Weigand had no glance for them but that of the master.

Antonie was discouraged and dropped her plan.

What now?

She had recoiled from no baseness. She had sacrificed to her love honour, self-respect, truth, righteousness and pride. But she had avoided hitherto the possibility of a conflict with the law. Occasional small thefts in the house did not count.

But the day had come when crime itself, crime that threatened remorse and the sword of judgment, entered her life. For otherwise she could not get rid of her husband.

The regions that lie about the eastern boundary of the empire are haunted by Jewish peddlers who carry in their sacks Russian drops, candied fruits, gay ribands, toys made of bark, and other pleasant things which make them welcome to young people. But they also supply sterner needs. In the bottom of their sacks are hidden love philtres and strange electuaries. And if you press them very determinedly, you will find some among them who have the little white powders that can be poured into beer ... or the small, round discs which the common folk call "crow's eyes" and which the greedy apothecaries will not sell you merely for the reason that they prepare the costlier strychnine from them.

You will often see these beneficent men in the twilight in secret colloquy with female figures by garden-gates and the edges of woods. The female figures slip away if you happen to appear on the road.... Often, too, these men are asked into the house and intimate council is held with them--especially when husband and servants are busy in the fields....

One evening in the beginning of May, Toni brought home with her from a harmless walk a little box of arsenic and a couple of small, hard discs that rattled merrily in one's pocket.... Cold sweat ran down her throat and her legs trembled so that she had to sit down on a case of soap before entering the house.

Her husband asked her what was wrong.

"Ah, it's the spring," she answered and laughed.

Soon her adorers noticed, and not these only, that her loveliness increased from day to day. Her eyes which, under their depressed brows, had assumed a sharp and peering gaze, once more glowed with their primal fire, and a warm rosiness suffused her cheeks that spread marvelously to her forehead and throat.

Her appearance made so striking an impression that many a one who had not seen her for a space stared at her and asked, full of admiration: "What have you done to yourself?"

"It is the spring," she answered and laughed.

As a matter of fact she had taken to eating arsenic.

She had been told that any one who becomes accustomed to the use of this poison can increase the doses to such an extent that he can take without harm a quantity that will necessarily kill another. And she had made up her mind to partake of the soup which she meant, some day, to prepare for her husband. That much she held to be due a faultless claim of innocence.

But she was unfortunate enough to make a grievous mistake one day, and lay writhing on the floor in uncontrollable agony.

The old physician at once recognized the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, prescribed the necessary antidotes and carefully dragged her back into life. The quantity she had taken, he declared, shaking his head, was enough to slay a strong man. He transmitted the information of the incident as demanded by law.

Detectives and court-messengers visited the house. The entire building was searched, documents had to be signed and all reports were carefully followed up.

The dear romantic public refused to be robbed of its opinion that one of Toni's rejected admirers had thus sought to avenge himself. The suspicion of the authorities, however, fastened itself upon a waitress, a plump, red-haired wanton who had taken the place of the imported beauties and whose insolent ugliness the men of the town, relieved of nobler delights, enjoyed thoroughly. The insight of the investigating judge had found in the girl's serving in the house and her apparent intimacy with its master a scent which he would by no means abandon. Only, because a few confirmatory details were still to seek, the suspicion was hidden not only from the public but even from its object.

Antonie, however, ailed continually. She grew thin, her digestion was delicate. If the blow was to be struck--and many circumstances urged it--she would no longer be able to share the poison with her victim. But it seemed fairly certain that suspicion would very definitely fall not upon her but upon the other woman. The latter would have to be sacrificed, so much was clear.

But that was the difficulty. The wounded conscience might recover, the crime might be conquered into forgetfulness, if only that is slain which burdens the earth, which should never have been. But Toni felt that her soul could not drag itself to any bourne of peace if, for her own advantage, she cast one who was innocent to lasting and irremediable destruction.

The simplest thing would have been to dismiss the woman. In that case, however, it was possible that the courts would direct their investigations to her admirers. One of them had spoken hasty and careless words. He might not be able to clear himself, were the accusation directed against him.

There remained but one hope: to ascribe the unavertible death of her husband to some accident, some heedlessness. And so she directed her unwavering purpose to this end.

The Polish peddler had slipped into Toni's hand not only the arsenic but also the deadly little discs called "crow's eyes." These must help her, if used with proper care and circumspection.

One day while little Amanda was playing in the yard with other girls, she found among the empty kerosene barrels a few delightful, silvery discs, no larger then a ten pfennig piece. With great delight she brought them to her mother who, attending to her knitting, had ceased for a moment to watch the children.

"What's that, Mama?"

"I don't know, my darling."

"May we play with them?"

"What would you like to play?"

"We want to throw them."

"No, don't do that. But I'll make you a new doll-carriage and these will be lovely wheels."

The children assented and Amanda brought a pair of scissors in order to make holes in the little wheels. But they were too hard and the points of the blades slipped.

"Ask father to use his small gimlet."

Amanda ran to the open window behind which he for whom all this was prepared was quietly making out his monthly bills.

Toni's breath failed. If he recognised the poisonous fruits, it was all over with her plan. But the risk was not to be avoided.

He looked at the discs for a moment. And yet for another. No, he did not know their nature but was rather pleased with them. It did not even occur to him to warn the little girl to beware of the unknown fruit.

He called into the shop ordering an apprentice to bring him a tool-case. The boy in his blue apron came and Toni observed that his eyes rested upon the fruits for a perceptible interval. Thus there was, in addition to the children, another witness and one who would be admitted to oath.

Weigand bored holes into four of the discs and threw them, jesting kindly, into the children's apron. The others he kept. "He has pronounced his own condemnation," Toni thought as with trembling fingers she mended an old toy to fit the new wheels.

Nothing remained but to grind the proper