Lilith
You may believe this tale or not, as you like. I am telling it to you exactly as I heard it, and you can judge for yourself how much truth there is in it. For my part, I think it contains elements which are too fantastic not to make the whole story seem rather strange, to say the least.
It all began in a rather sparsely settled district in Rumelia, when it was still under the control of the Turks. I say, control, but actually there was very little control, for the country was overrun by the warring Bulgarian “Comitjes®” and Greek “Bands” who, beside attacking each other, used to levy tribute upon the villagers, punish “disloyal ones” or carry off women, as the case might be, in accordance with their policy of “Bulgarising” or “Hellenising” the country under the very nose of the Turks. Occasionally, the villagers would call in the aid of the Turkish soldiers to rid themselves of these marauders and thus unconsciously lay the basis for tales of Turkish atrocities which their persecutors at Sofia and Athens would assiduously circulate through the guileless press of Europe and America. But this has nothing to do with my tale, except that it was told me as part of this most fantastic story.
A motley gang of Greek and Bulgarian laborers one day followed a young engineer and his wife through the great woods near the village of V———, by a long, thin path which ran through the huge forest like a fine thread.
The Greeks and Bulgarians, generally at strife through the greater part of the distriet of Rumelia, as they were, maintained a distrustful silence as they walked. They gazed sullenly at the tall form of Julius, the engineer, who, being a Jew, was alone trusted not to betray one faction to the other. He alone could unite the fierce elements for the purpose in hand, the proposed construction of the great aqueduct, and the laborers followed him with sullen conhdence.
Julius himself, however, was thinking of other things just then. It was more than
a year that he had given up a rather profligate existence in Vienna to get married and settle down to the more serious work of the world. Nevertheless, his thoughts kept recurring to the scenes of Viennese gaiety in which he had figured, the balls, the rout, the carousals, the fascination of sparkling, untameable women. . . .
Thus the expedition went on in comparative silence. Only Eva seemed to treat it as a sort of holiday, and she prat- tled interminably as she leaned on her husband’s arm and jumped with girlish vim over small stones and branches Iying in the pathway. Julius rejoined in monosyl- lables, thus unconsciously provoking her to even more teasine earrulousness.
“Then we shan’t call on your father here?” she asked, with disappointment in her voice.
"Not yet."
"Why?" she persisted.
His brow was contracted in an effort to reply while thinking of other things. Strangely enough, the more serious he seemed, the more the essential goodness and weakness of his character manifested itself. Julius passed his hand over his high, luminous forehead, from which his dark, curly, pompadour-growing hair was already beginning to retreat.
"Why? I told you why—because we've not been on good terms since I ran off to Vienna to study." As he spoke, he kept glancing over his left shoulder.
"But if he sees our child?" urged Eva.
He did not answer. The pine-breathed forest was so deep and yet so still and the autumn leaves had such startlingly strange colors that it seemed almost as though some strange divinity lived in the woods who might emerge at any moment from its depths, and Eva did not greatly wonder that Julius was always looking back. But suddenly they heard a rare, wild, wonderful voice singing distantly in their rear.
"What is that?" asked Eva, startled.
No one replied, but the bushy-browed Bulgarians and the Greeks crossed them-