Karen believed that, in his own mind, Christian expected her to pay
some attention to her child. She had secretly written to her mother,
but no answer had come.
Christian had never mentioned the child. He did not expect to find any
softening in Karen. Her behaviour gave no sign of any.
But brooding in her bed she wondered both what Christian expected of
her and what had become of her child. Occasionally a glassy clinking
could be heard. It came from the pearls. She would reach for them
to assure herself of their presence. When she felt them, a smile of
mysterious well-being appeared on her face.
For three days Christian had not been out of his clothes. He fell
asleep in a corner of the sofa. Since morning a formless disquietude
had possessed him.
Isolde Schirmacher, noisily bringing in Karen’s soup, wakened him. He
put the chairs in their places, cleared the table of his books, put the
checked cover on it, and opened the window. “It’s Sunday,” he said.
“I don’t want soup,” Karen grumbled.
“And I went and made it for you extry,” Isolde whined, “and a pork
fricassee and all. You never want nothing.”
“Eat the stuff yourself,” Karen said spitefully.
Isolde carried the soup out again.
“Can’t you close the window?” Karen whined. “Why do you always have to
open it? A person can freeze to death.”
Christian closed the window.
“I’d like to know why she carried the soup out again,” Karen said after
a while. “That’d suit her, to gorge herself on what’s meant for me. I’m
hungry.”
Christian went to the kitchen and brought in the soup. He sat down
beside her bed, and held the plate in both hands while she laboriously
ate the soup. “It’s hot,” she moaned, and pressed her head against the
pillows. “Open the window so’s I can get a bit of air.”
He opened the window. Karen looked at him with a dull wonder in her
eyes. His patience was unfathomable to her. She wanted to get him to
the point of scolding and showing her her place.
During the night she would make twenty demands and then reverse them
with embittered impatience. His kindliness remained uniform. It
enraged her; she wanted to scream. She cried out to him: “What kind of
a man are you, for God’s sake?” She shook her fists.
Christian did not know what to answer.
At two o’clock Dr. Voltolini arrived. The clinical assistant who had
examined Karen at Ruth’s request had no time to make regular visits,
so Ruth had suggested that Voltolini, whom she knew, be permitted to
continue the treatment.
Karen refused to answer nearly all his questions. Her hatred of
physicians dated from her experiences on the streets.
“I hardly know what attitude to take,” Dr. Voltolini said to Christian,
who accompanied him to the stairs. “There’s an incomprehensible
stubbornness in her. If I didn’t want to accommodate you, I would have
given up the case long ago.” He had been deeply charmed by Christian,
and often observed him tensely. Christian did not notice this.
He reproached Karen for her behaviour.
“Never mind,” she said curtly. “These doctors are swindlers and
thieves. They speculate on people’s foolishness. I don’t want him to
lay his hand on me. I don’t want him to listen to my heart so I can
smell his bald head, or tap me all over and look like an executioner. I
don’t need him if I’m going to live, and less if I’ve got to die.”
Christian did not answer.
Karen crouched in her bed. She suffered from pain to-day. A saw seemed
to be drawn up and down between her ribs. She went on: “I’d like to
know why you bother to study medicine. Tell me that. I’ve never asked
you anything, but I’d like to know. What attracts you about being a
saw-bones? What good will you get out of it?”
Christian was surprised at her insistent tone and at the glitter in her
eyes. He tried to tell her, arguing clumsily. He talked to her as to
an equal, with respect and courtesy. She did not wholly understand the
sense of his words, but she thrust her head far forward, and listened
breathlessly.
Christian said that it was not the study itself that had attracted
him, but the constant contact with human beings into which it brought
you. Then, too, there was the natural temptation to choose a study the
length of which could be shortened by bits of knowledge that he already
had. When he first determined to take it up, he had also thought of
its practical usefulness to him. That thought he had now abandoned. He
had believed that he might earn his livelihood by practising medicine;
but he had been forced to the conclusion that he was morally incapable
of earning money by any means. He had reached this conclusion not
long since. He had gone to visit the student Jacoby and found him
out. Just then a child of the landlady had fallen from a ladder and
become unconscious. He had carried the child into the room, rubbed it
with alcohol, listened to its heart, and stayed with it a while. When
the child had quite recovered and he himself had been ready to go,
the mother had pressed a two-mark piece into his hand. He had had the
impulse to laugh into the woman’s face. He hadn’t been able to realize
the cause of his shame, but the sense of it had been so strong as to
make him dizzy. And that incident had taught him the impossibility of
his taking money for services.
Even while he was speaking, it came to him that this was the first time
he had ever talked to Karen about himself. It seemed quite easy to do
so, because of the solemn attention with which she listened and which
changed her whole expression. It seemed to rejuvenate him. A sense of
well-being surged through him, a peculiar joy that seemed to affect his
very skin. He had never known a joy like that. It was a new feeling.
And so he continued more freely--quite frankly and without reserve.
Science, he told her, was rather indifferent to him in itself. He
valued it as a means to an end. He didn’t know whither it would lead
him. The future had grown less rather than more clear to him recently.
At first, as he had told her, he thought that he might enter a
profession and practise it like most young men. In that hope he had
been disappointed. Nevertheless he knew that he was fundamentally
on the right track. It was a time of preparation for him, and every
day was enriching him. He got a great deal closer to people now, and
saw them without pretence and falseness. In a hospital dormitory, in
the waiting-room of a clinic, in the operating room, in the presence
of hundreds of sufferers--in such scenes all hypocrisy died; there
truth gripped one, and one understood what one had never understood
before, and one could read the open book of life. Tubercular children,
scrofulous children, large-eyed children beholding death--whoever had
not seen that had not yet truly lived. And he knew whence they came and
whither they went and what they said to one another, these fathers and
mothers and strange crowds, and how each human creature was supremely
interesting and important to itself. No horror frightened him any more,
no wound, no terrible operative incision; he could see such things
quite coldly now; he had even thought of volunteering for service in
the lepers’ colony in East Prussia. But his urge was toward deeper and
ever deeper abysses of life. He was never satisfied. He wanted to steep
himself in humanity. There were always new horrors behind the old,
other torment beyond any he had seen; and unless he could absorb all
that into himself, he had no peace. Later he hoped to find still other
ways. He was only practising upon sick bodies; later he would sink
himself into sick souls. But it was only when he had unveiled something
secret and hidden that his heart felt free and light.
Resting her arms on the edge of the bed and bending over far,
Karen watched him with avid wonder. She understood and yet did not
understand. At times she caught the drift, at times the sense of the
words themselves. She nodded and brooded, contorted her mouth and
laughed silently and a little wildly; she held her breath, and had a
dim vision of him at last, of this noble and strange and beautiful
being who had been utterly mysterious to her to this very hour. She
saw him as he was, and it seemed to her as though she were in the
midst of a flaming fire. It made her desperate that she had to be so
silent, that she was so like stone within, that she had no words at her
command, not one, that she could not even say: “Come to me, brother.”
For he was of flesh like her own; and that made her feel alive. She
felt gratitude as she had before felt despair and weariness, disgrace
and hatred. Her gratitude was like a flame cleansing her wilderness,
and it was also a great urge and a woeful joy, and at last again
despair. For she felt that she was dumb.
Christian left in strange haste. Karen called in Isolde Schirmacher,
and told the girl she was free for the evening. She got up and dressed
slowly and painfully. She could hardly stand, and the room whirled
around with her. The table seemed to cling to the ceiling and the oven
to be upside down. But at each step she trod more firmly. She hid the
pearls in her bosom. She faltered down the stairs, and strange colours
flickered before her eyes. But she wanted to do something for him. That
thought drove her onward. She wanted to drag herself to a cab and drive
to her mother and ask: “Where is the child? Where did you take it?” And
if the old woman was impudent, she meant to clutch her and strangle her
till she told the truth.
To do something for him! To prove to him that there was a Karen whom he
did not know.
She crept along the walls of the houses.
Christian was just coming back when a policeman and a working man,
followed by an idle crowd, half led, half carried her home. He was
confounded. She was white as chalk. They laid her on the bed. Since
Isolde was not there, Christian knocked at the door of the Hofmann flat
to ask Ruth to help him with Karen. But he caught sight of the little
slate, and read the message that Ruth had left for her brother.
The chaotic unrest that he had felt all day rose more powerfully within
his soul.