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.