Part 18

The house, sunk into the treacherous immobility of its nights, appeared to him in the guise of a monstrous skeleton, consisting of countless walls and beds and doors steeped in malodorous darkness. Yet he loved it--loved the shabby stairs, the weather-beaten walls and posts, the fires in its many hearths that he had seen in passing, the emaciated woman who, in some room, scolded her wailing babe to sleep. He loved the manifold disconsolateness of these tangled lives; he loved the withered, sooty little flowerpots by the court windows, the yellow apples on the shelves, the scraps of paper in the halls, the very refuse that dishevelled women carried in troughs into the street.

But still his inner vision clung to the door-mat of straw and to the key under it, to Hofmann’s letter, the books and papers on the table, the little cotton frock on a nail, the loaf of bread on the side table. And from all these things there emerged in his consciousness the figure of Ruth, as though it were rising from the elements of which it was made.

He remembered accompanying her to one of the great shops, where she bought a pair of cheap gloves. With the crowd they had drifted through the show-rooms and he recalled the very still delight upon her face with which she had regarded the mountains of snowy lingerie and of brilliantly hued silks--the laces and hats and girdles and costumes and all things that enchant and lure a young girl. But she had been content with that strange, still delight that seemed to say: how well it is that such things are! She had had no desire, no reaching out of her own, only a pleasure in the lovely qualities of things that were.

And thus too, without desire and without reaching out, she passed among men, and perceived the festive glitter of the great shops, the radiant wealth of palaces, and the fever of pleasure-seeking that throbbed in the streets when the great city strove to forget its toil. With that same gesture and that still content, she withdrew herself from sharp allurements and the anodynes of a thousand temptations, from all that transcended true measure and her own power; she threw the mantle of her youth over the world and stood in its midst, deeply moved, and yet aloof.

He had been present one day when she was arguing with the student Lamprecht, whose ideas were those of a demagogue. She had a charming lightness of speech, although her opinions were decided enough. Action and sacrifice had been mentioned, and Ruth said that she could not see the difference, that often they were closely akin or even identical. And finally she said: “It is the mind alone that conquers obstacles, and in it action and sacrifice are one.” When her opponent replied that the mind must somehow communicate itself to the world and that this was, in itself, action, she had replied with burning cheeks: “Must one really proclaim and communicate the mind to the world? Then it ceases to be itself. The service of the heart is better than the service of lips or hands.”

Although Christian had listened with the superior smile of one who never engages in argument, he had seen then that this voice had become necessary to his very life, and also this radiant eye and this glowing heart, and this vibrant soul that was so profoundly experienced and yet so incomparably young. She gave him to himself. She was his sister and his friend. He was revealed to himself through her pure humanity. And he could find no sleep, for her shadow appeared to him constantly and yet did not find the courage to address him. Now and then he started suddenly and his heart beat quickly. Once he beheld her in bodily form, and seemed to hear an imploring whisper; and a cold shudder ran over him. He arose and lit the candle again. Karen moaned.

He stepped up to her bed. “Water,” she murmured.

He brought her water, and while she drank he bent affectionately over her. Her eyes were large and looked at him with a great sadness. There were tears in them.

XXI

Amadeus Voss lived in Zehlendorf, near the race track, in the gabled attic of a new house. He had a view of meadows stretching toward a rim of pine-woods. On the green plain projected a huge advertising sign with gigantic letters: Zehlendorf-Grunewald Development Company, Ltd.

“They put that up within the last week so as to keep my soul within proper bounds,” Voss said. “It’s a clever memento, isn’t it? I’m told the company plans to build a church here. Magnificent! In the neighbourhood there is also a bell-foundry.”

Johanna sat at the opposite window, through which the sunlight that she sought shone in. Her little face had grown thin. Her beautifully curved mouth with its sweet sadness lost its charm on account of her homely nose. “You might get employment as a lay reader,” she said impudently, and dangled her legs like a schoolgirl. “Or do you think it’s a Protestant business? Of course, every one is Protestant here. Why don’t you convert the unbelievers? You let your most solid talents go to waste.”

Voss made a grimace. With dragging steps he went through the large studio-like room. “To your kind of free thought all faith is an object of barter,” he said bitterly. “Why do you mock even at yourself? See to it lest the light that is in you be not darkness! That is the monition of the Gospel. But what does that word ‘Gospel’ mean to you? A cultured phrase, or something to buy and sell.”

Johanna, supporting her head on her hand, whispered inaudibly, “No one knows how it came that Rumpelstilzkin is my name.” Aloud she said: “I’m getting a bad report, I see. I’m resuming my seat, teacher. I know that my laziness is obvious even from your exalted seat.”

Amadeus stopped in front of her. “Have you never believed? Has the inscrutable never touched your heart? Have you never trembled before Him? Have you no reverence? What kind of a world do you come from?”

She answered with biting sarcasm. “We spent our days dancing around the golden calf--all of us, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and child. Fancy that! It’s dizzying.”

Impervious to the mockery through which she expressed the fragile charm of her clever mind, Voss fixed on her a look of sombre passion. “Do you at least believe in me?” he asked, and grasped her shoulders.

She resisted and withdrew herself. She thrust her hands against his chest and bent back her head. “I believe in nothing, nothing.” Her whole body throbbed and shook. “Not in myself nor you nor God nor anything. You are quite right. I don’t.” Her brows contracted with pain. Yet she melted, as always, before his glow. It was her ultimate of earth and life, her last anodyne, her weakness yearning for destruction. Her lips grew soft and her lids closed.

With savage strength Amadeus lifted her in his arms. “Neither in yourself nor God nor me,” he murmured. “But in him! Or perhaps you do not believe in him either? Tell me!”

She opened her eyes again. “In whom?” she asked astonished.

“In him!” His utterance was tormented. She understood him, and with an infinitely sinuous movement glided from his arms.

“What do you want of me?” she asked, and rearranged her abundant brown hair with nervous gestures.

“I want to know,” he answered, “to know at last. I cannot bear this any longer. What happened between you two? How do you explain the intimate tone of your letter to him, and your questions whether he had already forgotten you, whether you dared even ask? No doubt you played the well-known game--the dangerous, lecherous game of moths in the lamplight. I am not so stupid as not to have guessed that. But how far did you venture toward the lamp--as far as the chimney or as far as the flame? And when he left you, what demands had you the right to make? What was he to you? What is he?”

It was the first time that Voss had spoken out. The question had been strangling him. He had set little traps for Johanna and searched her expression, resented her evasions and yet respected her delicacy. And all that had heightened his impatience and suspicion. The fingers of one hand clenched under his chin, he stood there lean and rocking strangely to and fro.

Johanna said nothing. A smile, half mocking, half of suffering, hovered about her lips. She wished that she were far away.

Voss gritted his teeth and went on: “Don’t think it’s jealousy. And if it is--perhaps there is no other word--yet I do not mean what you were taught to think it in the poisoned gardens in which you grew up. Why have you not been frank with me? Am I not worthy of so much? Did you not feel my dumb beseeching? I need not tell you what is at stake. If you did not suspect it, you would not fear to speak. From my childhood on I have lived in outer servitude and inner obedience. I have been taught the lofty and sacred ideal of chastity of our faith. Only despair over the unreachable farness of that ideal plunged me into the sinks of the earth’s iniquity. And so I place on innocence and spotless purity quite another value than the sleek little gentlemen, the trained animals, of your world. I who stand before you am sin and the sense of sin, with all its misery and uncleanness; and you can save me by a word. I have confessed to you all the cries of my own breast. Have I not said enough? Yet even what I have said seems shameless beside the vanity of your reserve. Can I do nothing but sting your senses, you heathen girl, and never reach your vitals or your soul? Confess, or I will tear the truth from you with red-hot pincers. Shall I have waited and renounced, to be fed on the leavings of another’s satiety? Did you live with him? Speak! Did he cheat me of your purity--he who has cheated me of everything? Speak!”

Johanna, aflame with indignation, took her hat and coat and left him. He did not move. Scarcely had she closed the door behind her, scarcely did he hear the sound of her retreating steps, when he raced after her. With equal speed he returned for his hat. When she was leaving the house he was beside her. “Hear me,” he stammered. “Don’t judge me harshly.” She quickened her pace to escape him. He would not fall behind. “My words were rough, Johanna, even brutal. But they were inspired by the very humbleness of love.” She turned into the street to the railway station. He blocked her path; he threatened to use force if she persisted. Passers-by turned and looked at them. To avoid a public scandal she had to go back with him. “At least,” she pleaded, “let us not return to the house. I can’t stay in the room. We can talk while we are out. But don’t come so near. People are laughing at us.”

“People, people! The world is full of people. They know nothing of us nor we of them. Say that you forgive me, and I’ll be as calm as though I had come from a card party.” He was pale to his forehead.

They walked in the wet, snowy air and over the soaking earth. The street ran into a field-path. Above the setting sun the sky was full of shredded clouds--red, yellow, green, blue. An express train thundered past them. Electric signals trilled. It was tiring to walk over the slippery leaves, but the damp wind cooled their faces.

Amadeus wore himself out in explanations. In the defence of himself, the rejected and humiliated one, the tormented member of a caste and race of the rejected and humiliated, he found expressions of such power that they oppressed Johanna and bent her will. He spoke of his love for her, of this terrible storm in his blood, from which he had hoped purification and strength and liberation, but which was wasting and crushing him instead. And so his doubt of her was like a doubt of God. If a youth doubts God the world breaks down and sinks into pure agony. And such was his case in the nights in which he panted for alleviation, and the darkness became an abyss filled with a thousand purple tongues of flame.

And like a blinded man turning in a circle, he began again to ask his question, first carefully and slyly, then impetuously and with passion. He pointed out incriminating details and circumstances that poisoned his imagination. He appealed to her pity, her sense of honesty, to some not wholly buried spark of piety within her. And again he painted the state of his soul, besought her with uplifted hands, then became silent, and with his sombre eyes looked helplessly about.

Johanna had been astonished from the beginning that the nature of her brief contact with Christian, which shone to her from the past like a bit of dawn, had not been obvious to him. If he had understood and taken what had happened as a matter of course, she would probably have admitted it quite naïvely. But his savagery and his avidity aroused her defiance and her fear more and more. Every new attack of his made her feel more unapproachable, and she suddenly felt that she had a secret to guard from him, a deep and proud secret, which no assurances and no persecutions would make her yield up. It was a possession that all good spirits bade her keep, that she should never give up to him who would regard it as a shameful thing and into whose unblessed power she had fallen. So she built defences, and was ready to fight and to lie, to endure all that was ugly and repulsive, reproof and degradation.

And these, indeed, she came to endure. All his obsessions concentrated themselves on this one point. His glances searched and his words probed her; behind every tenderness and every touch there lurked a question. If she evaded him, he became enraged. If she soothed him, he cast himself down and kissed her feet. She took pity on him, and for the space of a few ecstatic hours deceived him with the liberally invented details of a platonic relationship. He seemed to believe her and begged her forgiveness, promising more gentleness and silence and consideration. But hardly had a day passed before the old mischief sprang up anew. His eye was sharpened as by acid. Christian Wahnschaffe was the enemy, the thief, the adversary. What happened at such and such a time? What did she say to him on such an occasion? What had he answered? Whence had he come? Whither was he going? Did he ask her to yield herself? Did she kiss him? Once? Many times? Had she desired his kisses? When was she ever alone with him? How did the room look? What sort of a dress had she worn? It was hopeless. It was like a drill that turns and eats into wood. Johanna repulsed him violently; she jeered and sighed and hid her face. She wept and she laughed, but she did not yield by the breadth of a hair.

Next came utter exhaustion. She was often so worn out that she lay on a sofa all day, pale and still. She let her relatives take her to theatres, concerts, picture galleries. With dull eyes and freezing indifference she endured these demands. The sympathy of people was a burden to her. What could they do to soften her cruel self-contempt? This killing contempt she transformed into a weapon, the two-edged sword of her wit, and this she turned against her own breast. Her sayings became famous in large circles of society. She described how she had once been bathing by a lake and how a sudden gust of wind had blown away her bath-chair. “And there,” she closed, “I stood as naked as God had created me in His wrath.”

Her aversion from him who was her lover rose to such a point that a cold fever shook her if she thought of him, that she secretly mocked his gestures, his tones, his clerical speech, his voracious glance. She made appointments with him which she did not keep. He sent telegrams and special delivery letters and messengers. He lay in wait at her door and questioned the servants until, beside herself, she went to him, and in her indignation said icy and unspeakably cruel things. Then he would become humble and rueful, and sincerely so. And the terror of losing her would wring words from him that were mad and diabolical.

She wasted away. She scarcely ate and slept. Again and again she determined to make an end of everything and leave the city. But there was the element of perverse desire. Her over-refined body, her over-subtle soul, her morbidly sensitive organism melted into a yearning for the cruel, for mysterious voluptuousness, for slavery and degradation, for every extremity of suffering and delight.

One evening she was crouching, half dressed, in a chair. Her long hair flowed beautifully over her slender shoulders. She held her head between her hands and looked like a disconsolate little harlequin, very pale and still. Amadeus Voss sat at the table with folded arms, and stared into the lamp. This isolation of two beings, without friends or dignity or happiness, seemed to Johanna like the inexorable fate of galley-slaves tied to the same oar. Suddenly she arose and gathered up her hair with a graceful gesture, and said with a scurrilous dryness: “Come in, ladies and gentlemen. This is the great modern show. The latest, up to the minute. Sensation guaranteed. Magnificent suspense interest. Revelation of all the secrets of modern woman and modern man. Gorgeous finale. Don’t miss it!”

She went up to the mirror, gazed at her image as though she did not know it, and made a comical bow.

Amadeus lowered his head in silence.

XXII

The poor imbecile Heinzen said he heard a whispering; always in his ears. He shook like a leaf and his face was green.

Niels Heinrich kicked him under the table.

Whenever the door was opened the laughter and the screeching of women leapt out into the fog. Also one could see the building lots at the edge of which this drinking shanty had been erected. A new quarter was springing up here. Beams and scaffoldings and cranes presented a confusion like a forest struck by a tornado. Walled foundations, pits, construction huts, trenches, bridges, hills of bricks and sand, carts--everything was dimly lit by the arc-lamps, which seemed to be hidden in grey wadding.

When the door was closed one was in a cave.

There was a whispering in his ears, Joachim Heinzen insisted. Without understanding he listened to the filthy witticisms with which an old stone-mason regaled the company. Niels Heinrich threw a dark glance at Joachim and forbade the publican to fill his glass. The fellow, he said, was crazy enough now.

Gradually the room grew empty. One o’clock was approaching. Three steady topers still stood by the bar. The nightwatchman had just looked in on his rounds and drunk a nip of kümmel. The innkeeper regarded his late guests morosely, sat down, and nodded.

Niels Heinrich said to the simpleton that he would give him five talers to clear out. “If you don’t fade away you’ll catch hell, my boy,” he said. His reddish beard rose and fell. About his neck he had wound a yellow shawl so many times that his head seemed to be resting on a cushion. His sallow, freckled face seemed a mere mass of bone.

Joachim’s limbs trembled. Outside the women of the streets were passing by, and their laughter sounded like the clatter of crockery. “Five talers,” said the imbecile and grinned. “That’s all right.” But he was still trembling. He had trembled just so the whole day, and the day before, and the day before that. “I’d like to buy a black-haired wench,” he murmured.

“For money you can see the very devil dance,” Niels Heinrich replied.

Now even those at the bar got ready to leave. “Closing time, gentlemen,” the innkeeper called out. He repeated his warning three times. A clock rattled.

“I’ll get what I want,” said the simpleton. “I want one like a merry-go-round. Merry. Around and around.”

“All right, boy! Go ahead! But don’t you let no balloon run you down,” Niels Heinrich jeered, and stared at his own fingers as though they had spoken to him. “Go ahead!”

“And I want one like a parrot,” said the simpleton, “all dressed up and fine.” And in a broken voice he sang a stave of a vulgar song.

Niels Heinrich’s silence was grim.

“And I want one that’s like what a lady is, elegant and handsome,” Joachim continued, and emptied the lees in his glass. “That’s what! Give me the five talers. Give ’em to me.” But suddenly he shuddered, his eyes seemed to protrude from their hollows, and he uttered a sound that had a strange and horrible kinship with a whine.

Niels Heinrich arose, and jerked his companion upward by the collar. He threw the money to pay his reckoning on the table, and pulled the simpleton out into the street. He grasped his arm, and drew the reeling, horribly whimpering creature along with him. He did not speak. He had pulled his blue cap over his eyes. His face was full of brooding thoughts. He paid no attention to snow or mud.

The fog swallowed up the two figures.

XXIII

David Hofmann had written a last message of farewell to his children from Bremerhaven. The postman had stuck the card halfway under the door, and Christian read it.

So Ruth could not be with her father. Here was a certainty that terrified him. Where was she then? And where was Michael?

He informed the house agent of the disappearance of the two, and the police were notified.

Christian knew the names of some of the families where she had given lessons. He visited these people, but no one could give him a hint. He went to the institutions that she had attended and to friends with whom she had associated. Everywhere there was the same surprise and helplessness. He was sent on wild errands and to other people. Some one would think he or she had last seen Ruth at such a place. The track was always lost. He would follow chance traces from morning until night, but they always faded from sight. In his anxiety and his anxious inquiries he finally found himself going in a futile circle.

He had entrusted Isolde Schirmacher and the widow Spindler with the care of Karen.

At the end of the fifth day he came home wearily. Botho Thüngen and the student Lamprecht had helped him in his search. It had all been in vain. If a faint hope arose, it was extinguished the next moment.

And where was Michael?

Christian climbed the stairs. The gas jet in the hall hissed. Near the balustrade cowered the white kitten and mewed. Christian bent over and gathered it up in his hands. It began to purr with infinite content, and snuggled against his coat. He stroked the silken fur, and a sense of the animal’s well-being passed into his nerves.

By agreement with the agent he had taken the key of the Hofmann flat into his keeping. He was to deliver it up next morning to a police detective who would come to investigate.

He unlocked the door and entered the dark room. The air was stuffy. Every breath of Ruth’s presence had faded. Ruth, little Ruth! As his emotion gathered in him, the darkness ceased to be unnatural and disturbing.

He sat down beside the table. The dim light that came in from the hall fell on the books and papers of his little friend. He got up and closed the door. Only now was he able to summon up the image of Ruth as vividly as he had been able to do during the first night after her disappearance. Not only did she emerge from the darkness as she had done then; she even spoke to him.

She fixed on him her exquisitely laughing eyes, and in a tone whose seriousness belied that expression utterly, she said: “No, never, nevermore.”

What did the words mean? What was their significance?

The fog gathered more thickly against the window panes. The kitten snuggled deeper into his arms. Its white fur shimmered indistinctly in the darkness. This breathing, living creature, warm and affectionate, prevented him from yielding to a grief that threatened to drag him into unknown depths.