Hermann Sudermann
The Song of Songs
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066221461
Table of Contents
PART I
CHAPTER I
Lilly was fourteen years old when her father, Kilian Czepanek, the music-master, suddenly disappeared.
It happened in this way. He had been giving piano lessons the whole day, in the interim swearing and drinking Moselle and Selters, for it was intensely hot. Occasionally he had slipped into the dining-room to take a cognac or arrange his Windsor necktie. He had pulled Lilly's brown curls as she sat labouring over her French vocabulary, and had disappeared again into the best room, where the girl pupils changed from hour to hour, and only the dissonances and the curses remained.
When the last victim had stumbled through her lesson and closed the hall door behind her, Czepanek failed to reappear in his usual bad temper and with his usual appetite. He remained in the front room, where this day he neither whistled nor whined nor played out his rage on the keyboard, as he sometimes did after a day's labour. In fact, he