Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE SONG OF SONGS (DAS HOHE LIED) BY HERMANN SUDERMANN TRANSLATED BY THOMAS SELTZER NEW YORK THE VIKING PRESS MCMXXVI Copyright, 1909, by J. G. COTTA'SCHE BUCHHANDLUNG NACHFOLGER, Stuttgart _All rights reserved_ Published in Germany, November 21, 1908 Privilege of copyright in the United States reserved under the act approved March 3, 1905, by J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger Published November 20, 1909 Second printing, January, 1910 Third printing, February, 1910 Fourth printing, April, 1910 Fifth printing, September, 1910 Sixth printing, September, 1911 Seventh printing, March, 1913 Eighth printing, December, 1913 Ninth printing, January, 1915 Tenth printing, June, 1916 Eleventh printing, 1919 Twelfth printing, April, 1921 Thirteenth printing, September, 1923 Fourteenth printing, December, 1926 THE SONG OF SONGS 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 gave scarcely a sign of life. Now and then a deep sigh--that was all. Lilly, who took warm interest in everything her handsome father did or did not do, let her French textbook slip from her lap, and stole up to the keyhole. Through it she saw him standing before the large pier-glass, absorbed in a close study of himself. From time to time he raised his left hand and pressed it as if in despair against his soft, silky, dark artist's curls, which Lilly's mother devotedly fostered every day with bay-rum and French oils. He and his reflection gazed at each other's moist red face with wild, eager eyes, and Lilly's heart expanded in love of her adored papa.