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.