At eight o’clock in the evening Christian knocked at Ruth’s door again.
No one answered. He was surprised.
He knew that the key was put under the door-mat when no one was at
home. He raised the mat and saw the key. Then he went back to Karen’s
rooms.
She seemed to be sleeping. Her face was like a piece of chalk. Her
strawy hair, like a flaming helmet, contrasted in ghastly fashion with
that pallor. After she had lain rigid for a while, she had undressed
herself and crept back into bed.
Christian listened at the wall again and again, trying to catch some
voice, some sign of life from the Hofmann flat. Silence. When two hours
had passed, he took a lighted candle and stepped out into the hall. The
key was still under the mat.
He thought he heard a sound of lamentation in the air. He did not think
he had the right to unlock the door and enter the flat. And yet, after
he had stood there for some time in indecision, he slipped the key into
the keyhole and opened the door.
A breath of melancholy came from the empty room. He put the candle
on the table and caught sight of Hofmann’s letter of farewell. He
hesitated to read it. He thought he heard steps and stopped to listen.
The feeling that the letter would explain Ruth’s absence finally
decided him to read it.
The letter seemed to him to remove all doubt. She had probably thought
her father still in the city, and set out to find him and dissuade him
from his plan. The acquaintance with whom she had hoped to find him
probably lived in Prenzlauer Alley, and Michael, when he had read her
message, had probably hurried on to the same place.
Although this reasoning seemed plausible enough, his imagination was
unsatisfied. He looked questioningly at the furniture and the walls,
and touched with tenderness the books on the table that Ruth had so
recently had in her hands. He left the room, locked the door, hid the
key under the mat, and returned to Karen’s rooms.
He blew out the light and lay down on the sofa. These nights of brief
and light slumber were exhausting him. His cheeks were thin, his
profile peaked, his lids inflamed, and his brain morbidly tense.
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.