Part 12

Evening came upon her, then night, but it brought no sleep. The pearls were in bed with her, close to her breast, warm by her skin. She felt them to assure herself of their presence; she listened to vague noises in the house, which were like threats of robbery to her. Then she lit a lamp and gazed at the pearls, and already she knew some of them. They turned faces upon her, and whispered to her, and were distinguishable through a warmer glow or a more pallid tint. Some of these were familiar and some quite strange, but they were all here--a shimmering wonder and a new life.

Thus too she passed the day that came and the night that followed the day. She knew that disease was burrowing in her body. She had expected it to show; but when it came, it was not with sudden violence but with treacherous sloth. One part of her after another was affected, and at last she could move freely no longer. She knew, too, that it was no ordinary indisposition from which one recovers within a few days. She felt it to be a process as of ripening which brings a fruit to its fall, as a concentration of the hostile forces that had before been scattered in effectiveness and in time. The life she had lived demanded a reckoning. The physician in the Hamburg hospital had foretold it all months before; now the time had come. She was very undemonstrative about her condition. She lay quietly in bed. She suffered no pain, and had but little fever.

Lying still there did not make her impatient. She was glad of the necessity; there was no better way of guarding the pearls. People might come and go. She had her treasure next her body, beside her very breast. She was sure of it at every moment and with every movement, and no one was the wiser. She pictured to herself what they would say and do, if she were to show them her secret treasure, if she were to call in one of those who all unconsciously passed her door or climbed the rickety stairs, or some one from the street or the tavern or the grog-shop--a poor fellow who had slaved all week, or a woman who sold her body for three marks, or another who had seven children to feed. In concentrated triumph she looked through the window at the rows of windows across the street. There lived the others whom misery throttled and in whom suffering whined. Like ants they crept about in the tall houses from cellar to garret, and had no suspicion of Karen’s pearls. Karen’s pearls! How that sounded and sang and glowed and glimmered--Karen’s pearls....

At last the secrecy became a burden. She did not enjoy her great possession as she would have done, had but one other shared the knowledge of it. She needed at least one other pair of eyes. She thought of Isolde Schirmacher, but the girl was too talkative and too stupid. She thought of the wife of Gisevius, of a seamstress on the fourth floor, of the huckstress in the street, of Amadeus Voss.

At last she hit upon Ruth Hofmann. The girl seemed the least harmful of all, and she determined to show her the pearls.

Under the pretext of asking the girl to fetch her something from the apothecary’s, she sent a message to the Hofmanns, and Ruth came in. Karen waited until Isolde had left the room; then she sat up and asked the girl to lock the door. Then she said: “Come here!” She turned the coverlet aside, and there lay the great heap of pearls upon the linen. “Look at that,” she said. “Those are real pearls, and they’re mine. But if you mention it to anybody, God help you, or my name ain’t Karen Engelschall.”

Ruth was amazed. Yet she looked on the pearls not with womanish desirousness, but like an imaginative soul beholding a marvel of the natural world. There was tension in her face, but it was wholly pleasurable. “Where did you get them?” she asked naïvely. “How wonderful they are. I’ve never seen anything like them. Are they all yours? They remind me of the Arabian Nights.” She kneeled down beside the bed, and surrounded the heap of pearls with her hands and smiled. The hanging lamp burned, and in the dim light of the room the pearls had an almost purple glow, and seemed animated by some dusky blood that pulsed within them.

Karen was annoyed by Ruth’s question, and yet she was almost as happy as she thought she would be in the surprise of another beholder. “Stupid! ’Course they belong to me. D’you think I’d steal them? They’re his mother’s pearls,” she added mysteriously, and bowed her head to Ruth’s ear. She was startled for a moment as she did so by the fragrance as of grass or the moist earth of February that emanated from the girl. “They’re his mother’s pearls,” she repeated, “and he brought them to me.” She did not know in what a deeply moved and reverential tone she spoke of Christian. Ruth listened to that tone, and doubts and guesses of her own were hushed.

“What ails you?” she asked, as she arose from her knees.

“I don’t know,” Karen answered, covering the pearls again. “Maybe nothing. I like to rest; sometimes it does a person good.”

“Is any one with you at night? It might happen that you need something. Have you no one?”

“Lord, I don’t need anything,” Karen answered with as much indifference as possible. “And if I do, I can get out o’ bed and fetch it. I’m not that bad yet.” The coarseness vanished from her face, and yielded to an expression of helpless wonder as she went on hurriedly: “He offered to stay up here at night. He wanted to sleep on the sofa, so I could wake him up if I felt bad. He said he wouldn’t mind and it’d be a pleasure. He spends his whole evenings here now, and sits at the table studying in his books. Why does he study so much? Does a man like him have to do that? But what do you think of him wanting to sleep there and watch me? It’s foolish!”

“Foolish?” Ruth answered. “No, I don’t think so at all. I was going to suggest doing the same thing. He and I could take turns. I can work while I watch too. I mean, of course, if it is necessary. But it won’t do to leave any one who is sick alone at night.” She shook her head, and her ash-blond hair moved gently.

“What funny people you are,” Karen said, and thrust her disordered hair almost to her eyes. “Real funny people.” She feigned to be looking for something on the bed, and her eyes that refused to look at Ruth seemed to flee.

Ruth determined to consult Christian concerning the night-watches.

VII

She spoke to Christian, but he said that her services as a night nurse were not necessary. He could not bring himself to assign such a task to her. She amazed him by her inner clarity and ripeness of character, yet he saw the child in her that should be spared all the more because she was not willing to spare herself.

She herself had thought a great deal about him, and had arrived at definite conclusions which were not very far from the truth. To be sure, she had heard gossip in the house, both from Karen Engelschall and from others, but her own vision and instinct had taught her best. What seemed mysterious to all others revealed itself as simple and necessary to her. It was never the rare and beautiful that astonished her in life; it was always the common and the mean.

At first she had been badly frightened of Karen. The poverty in which her family had always lived had brought her into familiar contact with the ugly things beneath the surface of society, yet she had never met a woman like Karen--so degraded and so sunk in savagery. To approach her had cost her each time a pang and a struggle.

But she had helped when Karen’s child was born; and on the following morning she had been there when Christian was in the room too. She had seen him bring the woman a glass of wine on an earthenware plate. He had smiled awkwardly, and his gestures had been uncertain; and in a flash she had comprehended everything. She knew whence he came and whence the woman came, and what had brought them together, and why they were living as they were. The truth which came to her seemed so beautiful a one to her that she flushed and hurried from the room; for she was afraid of laughing out in her joy, and seeming frivolous and foolish.

From that day on she no longer regarded Karen shyly or with aversion, but with a sisterly feeling that was quite natural, at least, to her.

Then came the incident of the pearls. She suspected their value only from Karen’s feverish ecstasy, her infinitely careful touch, the morbid glitter of her eyes. But what impressed her most was not the pearls, nor Karen, nor Karen’s horrible happiness, but what she guessed of Christian’s action and its motives.

One Saturday night, when Isolde Schirmacher had gone out with one of her father’s journeymen, Christian rang the bell of the Hofmann flat, and begged Ruth to go to a nearby public telephone and summon a physician. Karen was evidently worse. She complained of no pain, but she was approaching a state of exhaustion. Ruth hastened to a certain Doctor Voltolini in Gleim Street who was known to her, and brought him back with her. The physician examined Karen. He was frank concerning his uncertainty with regard to her symptoms, and gave some general advice. Afterward Ruth and Christian sat together beside the bed. Karen stared at the ceiling. Her expression changed continually; her breathing was regular but rapid. At times she sighed; at times her glance sought Christian, but flitted past him. Once or twice she gazed searchingly at Ruth.

Next day Christian came to see Ruth. She was alone; she was usually alone. When she unlatched the door which gave immediately upon the public hall she held a pen-holder in her hand. Her eyes still held the absorption of the occupation from which she had come. But when Christian asked whether he was interrupting her, she answered “No” with quieting assurance.

He held out his hand. With a gently rhythmic gesture she put her smooth, young hand into his.

She was voluble. Everything about her was touched with swiftness--her walk and glance, her speech and decisions and actions.

“I must see the place where you live,” she announced to him, and on the next forenoon she visited his room. She was a little breathless, because, according to her custom, she had run down the stairs. She looked about her very frankly, and hid her seriousness under a cheerful vividness of behaviour. With boyish innocence of movement she sat down on the edge of the table, took an apple from her pocket, and began to nibble at it. She said she had mentioned Karen to an assistant whom she knew at the Polyclinic, and the lady had promised to come and examine Karen.

Christian thanked her. “I don’t believe that medical help can do much for her,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you the reason. But where Karen is concerned, nature pursues a quite logical method.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Ruth answered. “But that sounds as though you had little confidence in science. Am I right? Why, then, are you studying medicine?”

“It’s the merest accident. Some one happened to call my attention to it as one of a hundred possible doors into the open. It seemed to me that it might lead to a very early usefulness. It offers a definite aim, and it is concerned with people--with human beings!” More pertinent reasons that stirred within him, and that he might have given her, were not yet ripe for speech, so he clung to a banality.

“Yes, people,” said Ruth, and looked at him searchingly. After a while she added: “You must know a great deal; there must be a great deal in you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She was the first human being in whose presence he felt wholly free of the compulsion to feign and to guard himself. In her there was a pure element that was frank and enthusiastic, that lived and vibrated with the souls of others. Her instincts had freedom and sureness, and her whole inner life radiated an irresistible intensity. The very stones gave up their souls to her. She was the seeing friend of inanimate things. She forgot neither words nor images, and her impatience to communicate what she had felt and the courage she had to acknowledge and follow her own heart surrounded her with an atmosphere as definite as the strong, sanative fragrance of plants in spring.

Life and its law seemed simple to her. The stars ruled one’s fate; that fate expressed itself through the passions of our blood; the mind formed, illuminated, cleansed the process.

She told Christian about her father.

David Hofmann was a typical Jew of the lower middle-classes from the eastern part of the country. He had been a merchant, but his business had failed, and he had left home to begin life over again. By indomitable toil he had saved up a few thousand marks; but a sharper had done him out of his savings, and in poverty and debt he had renewed the struggle for a third time. His industry was tireless, his patience magnificent. From Breslau he had moved to Posen, from Posen to Stettin, thence to Lodz, and from Lodz to Königsberg. All winter he had tramped the country roads from village to village and from manor-house to manor-house. He had seen his wife and his youngest child sicken and die, and had finally set his last hope on the life and opportunities of the metropolis. Eighteen months ago he had come to Berlin with Ruth and Michael, and here too he was on his feet day and night. With mind exhausted and enfeebled body, he still dreamed of some reward and success to ease his approaching latter years. But failure was his portion, and in hours of reflection he would yield to despair.

She told Christian about her brother.

Michael was taciturn. He never laughed; he had no friend, sought no diversions, and avoided the society of men. He suffered from his Jewishness, shrank nervously from the hatred that he suspected everywhere, repelled every advance, and felt all activity to be futile. During the forenoon he would lie on his bed for hours with his hands behind his head and smoke cigarettes; then he strolled to the little restaurant where he met his father for their midday meal. When he returned he would loiter in the yard and the alleys and at the factory gates, beside fences or public-houses. With hat pulled down and hunched shoulders, he observed life. Then he returned home and sat around, brooding and smoking. He tried to avoid being seen in the evening, when Ruth sat down to her work or their father sighed with weariness.

His eyes, which seemed to lift their gaze from a great depth, were of a golden brown, and their irises, like Ruth’s, contrasted strongly with the brilliant whiteness of the eye-ball.

Ruth said: “The other day I happened to come up when half a dozen street Arabs were following him and crying: ‘Sheeny!’ He slunk along with bowed back and lowered head. His face was terribly white; he twitched every time he heard the word. I took him by the hand, but he thrust me back. That evening father complained that business had been poor. Michael suddenly leaped up, and said: ‘What does it matter? Why do you try to do anything in such a world as this? It is too loathsome to touch. Let’s starve to death and be done with it. Why torment ourselves?’ Father was horrified, and did not answer. He thinks that Michael hates him because he has not been able to keep us from poverty and want. I do my best to talk him out of it, but he feels himself guilty, guilty toward us, his children; and that is hard, harder than penury.”

She felt it to be her duty to try to sustain the poor man, who tormented himself with reproaches, and to renew his hope. She consoled him with her lovely serenity. It was her pleasure to clear difficulties from his path, and then to declare that they had been negligible.

When she had been a little girl of seven she had nursed her mother through her last illness. She had done the work of a servant, and cooked at the great stove, when she could hardly reach the lids of the pots. She had watched over her brother, gone errands, put off creditors, and gained respite from sheriffs. She had collected money that was due; and at each change of dwelling she had created order in the house, and won the good-will of those on whom her family would be dependent. She had mended linen and brushed clothes, driven care away, caused insults to be forgotten, and brought some cheer into the darkest hours. She had found some sweetness in life, even when bitterness rose to the very brim.

Christian asked her what she was working at. She answered that she was preparing herself to take her degree. She had been relieved of all fees at the gymnasium. To help her father, whose earnings decreased steadily, she gave private lessons. To prolong her efforts far into the night cost her no struggle; five hours of sleep refreshed her and renewed her strength. In the morning she would get breakfast, set the room and kitchen to rights, and then start upon her path of work and duty with an air and mien as though it were a pleasure trip. She carried her dinner in her pocket. If it was too frugal, she would run to an automatic restaurant late in the afternoon.

One evening she returned from a charity kitchen, where twice a week she helped for half an hour to serve the meals. She told Christian about the people whom she was accustomed to see there--those whom the great city had conquered. She imitated gestures and expressions, and reported fragments of overheard speech. She communicated to him the greed, disgust, contempt, and shame that she had seen. Her observation was of a marvellous precision. Christian accompanied her on the next occasion, and saw little, almost nothing. He was aware of people in torn and shabby garments, who devoured a stingy meal without pleasure, dipped the crusts of bread into soup, and surreptitiously licked the spoon that had conveyed their last mouthful. There were hollow faces and dim eyes, foreheads that seemed to have been flattened by hydraulic pressure, and over it all a lifelessness as of scrapped machinery. Christian was teased as by a letter in an unknown tongue, and he began to understand how little he had learned to feel and see.

Although he had tried in no way to call attention to his presence, and had seemed at first glance but another wanderer from the street, a strange movement had passed through the hall. It had lasted no longer than three seconds, but Ruth, too, had felt the vibration. She was just filling one hundred and twenty plates, set in a fourfold circle, with vegetables from a huge cauldron. She looked up in surprise. She caught sight of the distinguished, almost absurdly courteous face of Christian, and she was startled. With mystical clarity she perceived the radiation of a power that wandered through the air without aim and lay buried in a soul. She bent her head over the steaming cauldron, so that her hair fell forward over her cheeks, and went on ladling out the vegetables. But she thought of the many unhappy creatures who waited for her on some hour of some day--suffering, confused, broken men and women--whom she desired so passionately to help, but to whom she could never be or give the miracle which had suddenly been revealed in that all but momentary vibration.

In a wild enthusiasm that was foreign to her nature she thought: “One must kneel and gather up all one’s soul....”

The one hundred and twenty tin plates were filled.

She thought of her poor. There was a young girl in a home for the blind, to whom she read on Sunday evenings. There was an asylum for the shelterless in Acker Street. She would look over the inmates and then ask help for them from charitable men and women who had come to expect her on this errand. In Moabit she had by chance come upon a woman with a baby at her breast; both were near starvation. She had saved them, had procured work and shelter for the woman, and taken the child to a home for infants. But these external things did not suffice her. She sought the establishment of human relations and the gift of confidence. She wrote letters for people, mediated between those whom life was threatening to divide, and thus, by giving her very self, she had also earned the fanatical devotion of that young mother.

She knew the names of many who were in great danger, and she knew many houses in which want was bitter. Once her interest had been excited by some children cowering in a corner during a socialistic women’s meeting. Another time chance had led her into the home of a striker. She had been present when a poor woman had been dragged from the canal, and hastened to the suicide’s family. On her way from giving a lesson to an errand of charity in a hospital, she had met an expelled student named Jacoby at the greasy table of a coffee-house, where he had begged her to meet him. Bad company and want threatened him with destruction. She had argued with him concerning his beliefs and principles and friends, and persuaded him into new courage and another attempt.

In the street that ran parallel to her own, there lived a machinist by the name of Heinzen with his family. An accident in a factory had robbed the man of both his legs, and the frightful nervous shock had reduced him to a paralytic condition. He usually lay in a state of convulsive rigour. One day a neighbour who was plagued with rheumatism had visited him; and this man had become aware of the fact that if Heinzen touched any part of his body the pain there was alleviated at once. The rumour had spread like fire. People talked of the miracle of magnetic healing, and a great many sick men and women came to Heinzen to be cured. He would take no money from them; but those who believed--and their numbers increased daily--brought his wife food and other gifts.

Ruth had heard of this. She had been in Heinzen’s flat. She was filled by what she had seen, and gave Christian a vivid account of her impressions.

Christian looked at her wonderingly. “Ruth,” he said, “little Ruth, those are such difficult matters. If you once begin to be absorbed by them, life itself is too short. I always thought that if one succeeded in quite exhausting but a single human soul, one would know a great deal and could well be content. But life is like the sea. Don’t you have to think of it every minute? And how is it that you are always so full of brightness? I don’t understand that.”

With radiant eyes Ruth looked into space. Then she arose, and from her single shelf of books she took down a narrow yellow volume, turned to a familiar page, and read out with childlike emphasis: “Concerning the joy of the fishes. Chuang-tse and Hui-tse stood on a bridge that spans the Hao. Chuang-tse said: ‘Look how the fishes dart. It is the joy of the fishes.’ ‘Thou art no fish,’ said Hui-tse, ‘how canst thou know wherein the joy of the fishes consists?’ And he continued: ‘I am not like thee and know thee not, but this I know, that thou art no fish and canst know naught of the fishes.’ Chuang-tse answered: ‘Let us return to thy question, which was: How can I know wherein the joy of the fishes consists? In truth thou didst know that I knew and yet thou askedst. It matters not. I know from my own delight in the water.’”

Christian pondered the parable.

“Don’t you know it, you of all people, from your delight in the water?” asked Ruth, and bent her head forward to catch his look.

Christian smiled an uncertain smile.

“Won’t you go with me to Heinzen’s house to-morrow?”

He nodded and smiled again. He understood suddenly what manner of human being sat beside him.

VIII

It was two o’clock at night when Christian got up from the table in Karen’s room and closed his books. He went to the sofa to lie down as he was. Toward evening Karen had been seized by a violent fever. The woman physician to whom Ruth had appealed had been there at noon, and had spoken of tuberculosis of the bones.