For the next few days he was nowhere to be seen. When he returned,
he was pale and grey. His bloodless red eyes lay tearfully in grimy
shadows. His voice had only a sing-song tone, with a mannered
melancholy. Schulz spoke mournfully, dreamily, about despair,
whoredom, and being torn apart inwardly. He said that he was fed up
with the joy of life, that he would soon catch up with his own death.
He avoided showing signs of tender feelings, but he often sighed
painfully. He flirted theatrically with a longing for dying. He
brought his friend to corpse-strewn tragedies, to gloomy film-dramas,
to serious concerts in darkened halls.

Perhaps a week had gone by. A woman had sung. The hands of the
listeners applauded loudly and long. Gottschalk Schulz passionately
grasped Lisel Lilichlein's fingers, laid them gently on one of his
thighs, and said: "Isn't it strange how a woman's song grips the soul!"
Then he again began to speak imploringly and tearfully of love and
yielding. Lisel Liblichlein said that this was boring or disgusting
to her. Out of pity--and because she wanted to go up--she finally
declared that she would agree to the love if he would give up the
business of surrender. Schulz happily pressed her to himself. He
stood there dreaming for a long time. He sang: "O tears. O goodness.
O God. O beauty. O love. O love. O love..." He dashed through
the streets. He had disappeared into the Cafe Kloesschen. But Lisel
Liblichlein sat in her small room, awkwardly smiling under a reddish
tallow lamp. She did not understand these city people, who seemed to
her strange, dangerous animals. She felt abandoned and more alone
than before. She thought with longing about her innocent homeland:
about the breezy sky, about the laughing young gentlemen, about
tennis matches, and she felt nostalgia for the Sunday afternoons--she