Papa, it is true, did not like to have the themes of his creation bandied about in everyday life. "Why don't you sing 'O du lieber Augustin' or 'Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan?'" he used to say when he caught one of them dreamily humming his arias. "They are plenty good enough for you."
Later his warnings grew unnecessary. Mama gradually forgot everything sounding like a song, and Lilly withdrew more and more into herself.
She had arranged a sort of mass from the Song of Songs, which she celebrated before the mirror when she knew she was alone in the house. She draped a sheet about her waist like a skirt, hung window-curtains over her shoulders, wound old lace about her neck, and wove spangles taken from shoes into her hair. Singing, weeping, and uttering shouts of joy, with genuflections, magic dances and airy embraces, she lived through Sulamith's bridal yearning and ecstasy as awakened to life again in papa's Song of Songs after a slumber of twenty-five hundred years.
The manuscript of this song became the anchor to which the hopes of Kilian Czepanek's family were henceforth fastened. It was conceivable that he, a vagabond, cast out by his own parents when a child, might abandon wife and daughter to want and pining--but to believe that he would desert the work of his lifetime, the sword wherewith he was to fight his way back into the great world, was sheer folly.
And while the sewing-machine whizzed and whirred day and night in the attic to which Mrs. Czepanek and her daughter had removed, while the body of the forsaken woman dried up entirely and grew ever more deformed, and the layer of paint with which she kept herself young rested upon cheekbones sharpening from week to week, there lay in the upper drawer of the linen chest (the chest had been saved from bankruptcy) an earnest of future reunion, working miracles by its proximity, the Song of Songs.
Lilly was now a tall young woman with a well-developed figure for her age, who carried her school-bag through the streets with the air of a princess.
Her plaid dress of mixed wool was always wrinkled by rain, and despite the let-out tucks was ever too short. Her rainy-day boots went to the cobbler time and again, and between the wavy ends of her cotton gloves and the hems of her sleeves laboriously stretched to meet them, gleamed a strip of red, slender arm.
