Part 23

These details had been recounted to Voss by a maid whom he had bribed with five marks. With tense face and inflamed heart he went home to consider what he should do. He found a letter from Johanna, who wrote: “I do not know how things will be between us in the future. At this moment I am incapable of any decision. I am not in the least interested either in myself or in my fate, and I have weighty reason for that feeling. Don’t seek me out. I am in Stolpische Street almost all day long, but don’t seek me out if you have any interest in me or if you want me to have the least interest in you in the future. I don’t want to see you; I can’t bear to listen to you at present. The experience I have had has been too dreadful and too unexpected. You would find me changed in a way that you would not like at all. Johanna.”

Pale with rage, he immediately rode into the city as far as the station on Schönhauser Avenue. When he reached Stolpische Street it was nine o’clock in the evening. Frau Gisevius told him that Fräulein Schöntag had left half an hour ago. He looked into Christian’s room, and saw an unknown boy sitting at the table. He drew the woman aside, and asked her who it was. She was amazed that he didn’t know, and told him that it was the brother of the murdered girl. She added that Wahnschaffe was quite unlike himself since the tragedy. He walked about like a lost soul. If you talked to him he either didn’t answer at all or answered at random. He didn’t touch his breakfast which she brought him every morning. Often he would stand for half an hour on the same spot with lowered head. She was afraid he was losing his mind. A couple of days ago she had met him in Rhinower Street, and there, in bright daylight, he had been talking out loud to himself so that the passers-by had laughed. Yesterday he had left without a hat, and her little girl had run after him with it. He had stared at the child for a while as if he didn’t understand. Shortly after that he had returned home with several of his friends. Suddenly she had heard him cry out and had rushed into his room. She had found him on his knees before the others, sobbing like a little child. Then he had struck the floor in his despair and had cried out that this thing could not be and dared not be true, that it wasn’t possible and he couldn’t endure it. Fräulein Schöntag had been there too. But she had been silent and so had the others. They had just sat there and trembled. This attack had been caused by some young men imprudently telling him that this was the day set for the official examination and autopsy of Ruth’s body. He had wanted to hasten to the court. They had restrained him with difficulty, and finally had to assure him that he would be too late, that everything would be over. All night long he had walked up and down in his room, while Michael had been lying on the leather sofa. The two hadn’t exchanged one word all night. She had slipped out of her room and listened repeatedly--not a syllable. At five o’clock in the morning Fräulein Schöntag had come; at seven Lamprecht and another student. They had persuaded him to go out to Treptow with them to spend the day. He had neither consented nor refused, and they had just dragged him along. Friends of Ruth Hofmann had come too and staid till noon--a woman and a young man. They sometimes came in the evening too, after Fräulein Schöntag had gone, so that Michael need not be alone. No one knew what was going to be done with the boy. His condition hadn’t changed in the least. He hadn’t even undressed, and if Fräulein Schöntag hadn’t known just how to get around him, he would not even have let anybody brush the mud from his clothes or wash his hands and face. Sometimes a red-haired gentleman would come to see the boy. She had heard that he was a baron and a friend of Wahnschaffe. This gentleman had brought a chessboard day before yesterday, because some one had said that Michael knew how to play chess and had often played with his sister. But when the chessmen had been set up, Michael had only shuddered and had not touched them. The board was still there on the table. Herr Voss could go and see for himself.

The woman would have gossipped on and on. But Voss left her with a silent nod. He had grown thoughtful. What he had heard of Christian had made him thoughtful. Careless of his direction, he turned toward Exerzier Square. He brooded and doubted. His imagination refused to see Christian as the woman had pictured him. It seemed an absolute contradiction of the possible, a mockery of all experience. Grief, such grief--and Christian? Despair, such despair--and Christian? The world was rocking on its foundations. Some mystery must be behind it all. Under the pressure of huge forces the very elements may change their character, but it was inconceivable to him that blood should issue from a stone, or a heart be born where none had been.

Forced back against his will, he returned to Stolpische Street. Suddenly he saw Johanna immediately in front of him. He called out to her; she stopped and nodded, and showed no surprise. But his hasty, whispered questions left her silent. Her face was of a transparent pallor. At the door of the house she stopped and considered. Then she walked back into the court to the window of Christian’s room. She wanted to look in, but a hanging had been drawn. She hurried into the hall, rang the bell, and exchanged some words with Frau Gisevius. Then she came back. “I must go upstairs,” she said, “I must see how Karen is.” She did not indicate that Voss was to wait. He waited with all the more determination. From the dwellings about he heard music, laughter, the crying of children, the dull whirr of a sewing-machine. At last Johanna came back and returned to the street at his side. She said in a helpless tone: “The poor woman will hardly outlive the night, and Christian isn’t at home. What is to be done?”

He did not answer.

“You must understand what is happening to me,” Johanna said, softly and insistently.

“I understand nothing,” Voss replied dully. “Nothing--except that I suffer, suffer beyond endurance.”

Johanna said harshly: “You don’t count.”

They were near the Humboldt Grove. It was cold, but Johanna sat down on a bench. She seemed wearied; exertions hurt her delicate body like wounds. Shyly Voss took her hand, and asked: “What is it, then?”

“Don’t,” she breathed, and withdrew her hand. After a long silence she said: “People always thought him insensitive. Some even said that that was the reason for his success with all who came near him. It was a nice theory. I myself never believed it. Most theories are wrong; why should this one have been right? There is so much vain talk about people; it is all painful and futile, both when it asserts and when it denies. His society wasn’t, I grant you, spiritually edifying. If one was deeply moved by something, one somehow, instinctively, hid it from him and felt a sense of embarrassment. And now--this! You can’t imagine it. And how am I to describe it? All the time, that first evening while he was taking care of Michael, he hadn’t yet been told anything. At nine or half-past he went up to Karen’s, intending to come back in an hour, but he came earlier. There were people loitering in the yard, and they told him. Then he came into the room, quite softly. He came in and....” She took out a handkerchief, pressed it to her eyes, and wept very gently.

Voss let her cry for a little while. Then he asked very tensely: “He came in and----? And what?”

Johanna kept her eyes covered, and went on: “You had the feeling: This is the end for him, the end of all content, of smiles and laughter--the end. In fifteen minutes his face had aged by twenty years. I looked at it for just a moment; then my courage failed me. You may think it fantastic, but I tell you the whole room was one pain, the air was pain and so was the light. It’s the truth. Everything hurt; everything one thought or saw hurt. But he was absolutely silent, and his expression was like that of one who was straining his eyes to read some illegible script. And that was the most painful thing of all.”

She fell silent and Voss did not break this silence. Enviously and rancorously he reflected: “We shall have to convince ourselves that blood can issue from a stone; we must see and hear and test.” Deliberately he fortified his will to doubt. The explanations which he gave in his own mind were of an unworthy character. Not to provoke Johanna he feigned to share her faith; and yet there was something about her story that stirred his vitals and made him afraid.

Johanna needed some support. She froze in her new freedom; she distrusted her strength to bear it. With a touch of dread and longing she wondered that no one dragged her back by force into the comfort of a sheltered, care-free, secure life.

She was not sorry to have Amadeus walking at her side. Ah, it was inconsistent and weak and faithless to one’s own self, but there was such a horror in being alone. Yet her gesture of farewell seemed utterly final when they reached the house in Kommandanten Street where she lived. Amadeus Voss, suspecting her weakness and her melancholy, accompanied her to the dark stairs, and there grasped her with such violence as though he meant to devour her. She merely sighed.

At that moment an irresistible desire for motherhood welled up in her. She did not care through whose agency, nor whether his kiss inspired disgust or delight. She wanted to become a mother--to give birth to something, to create something, not to be so empty and cold and alone, but to cling to something and seem more worthy to herself and indispensable to another being. Had not this very man who held her like a beast of prey spoken of the yearning of the shadow for its body? Suddenly she understood that saying.

Sombre and searching and strong was the look she gave him when they stepped out upon the street again. Then she went with him.

VII

Karen was still alive in the morning. Death had a hard struggle with her. Late at night she had once more fought herself free of its embrace; now she lay there, exhausted by the effort. Her arms, her hands, her breasts were covered with sores filled with pus. Many had broken open.

Three women rustled through the room--Isolde Schirmacher, the widow Spindler, and the wife of a bookbinder who lived in the rear. They whispered, fetched things back and forth, waited for the physician and for the end.

Karen heard their whispers and their tread with hatred. She could not speak; she could scarcely make herself understood; but she could still hate. She heard the screeching and rumbling in the flat that had been the Hofmanns’ and was now the Stübbes’. The drunkard’s rising in the morning was as baleful to his wife and children as his going to bed at night. All the misery that he caused penetrated the wall, and aroused in Karen memories of equal horrors in dim and distant years.

Yet for her there was really but one pain and one misery--Christian’s absence. For days he had paid her only short visits; during the last twenty-four hours, none at all. Dimly she knew of the murder of the Jewish girl, and dimly felt that Christian was changed since then; but she felt so terribly desolate without him that she tried not to think of that. His absence was like a fire in which her still living body was turned to cinders. It cried out at her. In the midst of the moaning of her agony she admonished herself to be patient, raised her head and peered, let it drop back upon the pillows, and choked in the extremity of her woe.

The door opened and she gave a start. It was Dr. Voltolini, and her face contorted itself.

There was little that the physician could do. The complications that had appeared and had affected the lungs destroyed every vestige of hope. Nothing was left to do but ease her pain by increasing the doses of morphine. “And, why save such a life,” Dr. Voltolini was forced to reflect, as he saw the terrible aspect of the woman still fighting death, “a life so complete and superfluous and unclean?”

It was the third occasion on which he had not found Christian here, yet he felt the old need of some familiar talk with him. He himself was a reserved man. To initiate a stranger into the secrets of his fate had been to him, heretofore, an unfamiliar temptation. But in Christian’s presence that temptation assailed him strongly and he suffered from it; and this was especially true since he had witnessed an apparently meaningless scene.

A journeyman of her father of whom she was fond had given Isolde Schirmacher a ring with an imitation ruby. Near the kitchen door she had shown Christian the ring in her delight. Dr. Voltolini was just coming out of the sick room. She took the ring from her finger, let the worthless stone sparkle in the light, and asked Christian whether it wasn’t wonderful. And Christian had smiled in his peculiar way and had answered: “Yes, it is very beautiful.” The widow Spindler, who stood in the kitchen door, had laughed a loud laugh. But an expression of such gratitude had irradiated the girl’s face that, for a moment, it had seemed almost lovely.

On the stairs the widow Engelschall met Dr. Voltolini. She stopped him and asked him his opinion of Karen’s condition. He shrugged his shoulders and told her there was no hope. It was a question of hours.

The widow Engelschall had long had her suspicions of Karen. Whenever she entered the room Karen grew restless, avoided her glance, and pulled the covers up to her chin. The widow knew what it was to have a bad conscience. She scented a mystery and determined to fathom it. There was no time to lose. If she hesitated now she might be too late and regret it forever after. Undoubtedly the secret was that Wahnschaffe had given her money, which, according to an old habit, she kept concealed about her person in an old stocking or chemise or even sewn up in the mattress. All the money that man had couldn’t have just vanished. He had probably put aside a few dozen thousand-mark notes or some securities. And who else should have them but Karen? If one put two and two together, considered his craziness and her behaviour, the matter seemed pretty clear, and the thing to do now was to prevent mischief. For if she didn’t happen to be present at the moment of Karen’s death, all sorts of people would be about, and the treasure would slip into the pocket of God knows who. You couldn’t read the theft in the thief’s face. These were the things that presented themselves very strongly to the widow Engelschall on her way to Stolpische Street.

Karen had her own presentiment regarding her mother’s thoughts. As her illness progressed her fear for the pearls rose and rose. They no longer seemed safe upon her body. She might lose consciousness and people might handle her and discover them. These fears disturbed her sleep. She often awakened with a start, stared wildly, and smothered a scream in her throat. She had accustomed herself to keep her hands under the covers, and her grasp of the pearls became mechanically convulsive whenever her senses sank into sleep or swoon. A frightful nightmare which she had, presented to her all the possibilities of danger. People came. Whoever wanted to, simply stepped into her room. She couldn’t prevent it; she could not get up and latch the door. She guarded herself most carefully from the doctor. She trembled before his eye, and the very pores of her body seemed to cling from below to the coverlet lest he turn it suddenly back.

She let the pearls wander about--now under her pillow, now under the sheet, sometimes upon her naked breast where they touched the open wounds. Becoming aware of this contact, she addressed herself with the cruel mockery of sombre pain: “What’s left of you? What are you now? A leprous carrion--ruined and done for and disgusted with yourself.”

Gradually she had become indifferent to the pecuniary value of the pearls, even though, during a sleepless night, in answer to her ceaseless questions, Christian had given her an insight into it which surpassed her wildest guesses. The figures were mere empty numbers to her. She shuddered, shook her head, and let the matter slide. The jewels had quite another effect on her now, and this increased in power as the old glamour of their mere value faded. At first the pearls had been a symbol and a lamentation over her fate; their lustre glimmered to her from that other shore of life from which no breath or message had ever before floated to her. But now they no longer stirred her to envy and wrath as they had once done, but only to regret over that all of life which she had wasted and flung aside. And she had wasted her life and flung it aside, because she had known nothing of beauty or loveliness or joy or adornment or, she could truly say, of earth and heaven. She could not re-live her ruined life; there was no other, and this one was gone.

But it seemed to her, as she lay there and brooded and let her flesh disintegrate, as though her lost earth and lost heaven were given back to her in every single pearl and in the whole string. Everything was in the pearls--the children she had conceived and born and lost in hatred, the poverty-stricken, all but unfulfilled dreams, the longing she had faintly felt for some human being, the wizened love, the jaded light, the petty hopes, the small delight. Everything crystallized in the pearls and became a soul. All that she had missed and gambled or thrown away or never reached, all that had been darkened for her or driven from her by want and sorrow--all this became a soul. And to this soul she was immeasurably devoted as she lay there and brooded and let her flesh disintegrate. For this soul was the soul of Christian. His soul was in the rope of pearls. It was this that she grasped and clung to, and wanted to possess even in her grave. Her blue eyes, under the narrow forehead and the strawy dishevelled hair, had the fetish-worshipper’s glow.

VIII

The widow Engelschall’s first concern was to get the women out of Karen’s room. To succeed she had to make her command abundantly clear. She hissed at the Schirmacher girl: “Would you mind taking your snub-nose out of this here place?” Isolde went, but she felt sure that the old woman had evil intentions.

When the widow Engelschall approached the bed, she saw that there was but just time for her to use the last glimmer of her daughter’s consciousness. If she had miscalculated--well, no harm was done, and she would be the first one, at all events, to have access to the dead woman’s body. Only there must be no shilly-shallying.

She began to talk. She sat down on a chair, bent far over toward Karen, and spoke in a raised voice so that no word should escape the dying woman. She said that she had meant to bring along some pastry, but the pastry-cook’s shop had been closed. In the evening, however, she intended to boil a chicken in rice or make a Styrian pudding with apple-sauce. That refreshed the stomach and improved the digestion. Sick people needed strengthening food, and one mustn’t be stingy with them. Stinginess, she declared, had never been a fault of hers, anyhow. No one could say that. And she had always been ready to do the right thing by her children. It had been toil and trouble enough, and she hadn’t counted on gratitude. You didn’t get that in this world anyhow, no more from your children than from Tom, Dick, or Harry.

Beset by death as she was, Karen heard only the tone of this hypocritical speech. She moved her arms. An instinct told her that her mother wanted something; a last effort at reflection told her what that was, and a last impulse warned her not to betray herself. She forced herself to lie still and not to let an eyelid quiver. But the widow Engelschall knew that she was on the right track. She herself, she continued, had never striven after riches. If ever a little superfluity had come to her, she had shared it with others. You couldn’t take anything into the grave with you anyhow, and though you clung to what you had like iron, it didn’t do you no good in the end. So it was more sensible and nobler too to give it up, and live to share the pleasure of the people you gave it to, and listen to their praises. Didn’t Karen remember, she asked, how when that old hag of a Kränich woman had died and eighty-seven pieces of gold had been found in her straw-mattress--didn’t she remember how, amid the joy, people had railed at the stingy beast? No one had shed a tear over her. They had consigned her to hell where she belonged.

Having said this, the widow Engelschall stretched out her hand, and with apparent carelessness began to feel about the pillow. The rope of pearls lay under it. She had not yet reached it; but Karen thought she had grasped it, and with feeble hands fought off the hands of her mother. Breathing stertorously, she raised herself a little, and threw herself across the pillow. The widow Engelschall murmured: “Aha, there we have it!” She was sure now. Swiftly she thrust her hand farther and pulled out an end of the rope of pearls. She uttered a dull cry. Her fat face oozed sweat and turned crimson, for she recognized at once the fabulous value of what she held. Her eyes started from their sockets, saliva dripped from her mouth. She grasped what she held more and more firmly, as Karen rested the whole weight of her body upon the pillow, stretched out her hands, dug her nails into her mother’s wrists, and whined a long, piteous whine. But in spite of her ghastly display of strength she succumbed in that unequal struggle. Already the widow Engelschall, uttering a low howl, had torn the pearls from their hiding-place; she was about to flee from Karen’s inarticulate screeching and blind rage and fierce moans and chattering teeth, when the door opened and Christian entered.