When Michael left the church at Johanna’s side he felt profoundly
stirred by the experience of the past hour.
They rode as far as Schönhauser Avenue, and from there on they went on
foot. The flurries of snow and the drifts on the ground made walking
doubly difficult for the limping boy.
During their long ride he had been silent, although his face showed
the pathetic eagerness of his thoughts and feelings. He had but
recently learned to express himself; formerly he had had to choke
everything down. And since he had learned to speak out he seized every
opportunity. His words were fresh, and his gestures expressive and
extreme. His tone belied his youth. With shrill accents he deadened
attacks of timidity. Afraid of not being taken as seriously as seemed
to befit him and his confusions and insights and experiences, he would
often defend daring assertions stubbornly, while his own conviction
of their truth was already wavering. On the way out he had repeatedly
begun to talk of Christian. His soul was filled by Christian. His
worship, half timid, half full of wild enthusiasm, expressed itself in
various ways. His mind had lacked an ideal and the spiritual centres
and intoxications of youth; now he gave himself up to these the more
gladly. Yet, in conformity to his brooding nature, he tricked out
Christian’s simpleness in various mysteries and problems, and on this
point Johanna could not set him right. She evaded his remarks. The boy
seemed to her too impetuous, too absolute, too eager. He affronted
the modesty of her feelings; he was too fond of rending veils. Yet he
fascinated her, and kept her in a state of restlessness and gentle
pain; and she needed both. She could fancy that she was protecting him,
and through this duty she was better protected against herself.
He said it hadn’t been the music that had overwhelmed him. Music of
that kind was an expression through difficult forms, and one should
not, it seemed to him, let pleasure in the sounds deceive one in regard
to one’s ignorance. One must know and learn.
“What was it then? What did impress you?” Johanna asked. But her
question showed only a superficial curiosity. The way and the day had
wearied her beyond the desire of speech.
“It was the church,” said Michael. “It was the song in praise of
Christ. It was the devout multitude.” He stopped, and his head fell. In
his childhood and until quite recently, he told her in his hoarse and
slightly broken boyish voice, he had not been able to think of Jesus
Christ without hatred. A religiously brought up Jewish child out in the
country, who had suffered the jeers and abuse of Gentiles, felt that
hatred in his very bones. To such a child Christ was the enemy who had
deserted and traduced his people, the renegade and source of all that
people’s suffering. “I remember how I used to slink past all churches,”
Michael said; “I remember with what fear and rage. Ruth never felt so.
Ruth had no sense for the reality of bitter things; to her everything
was sweet and clear. She left the vulgar far below her. It ate into me,
and I had no one to talk to.”
But one evening, a few days before her disappearance, Ruth without his
asking her and without any preliminary speech, but simply as though she
wanted to get closer to him and release him from his oppressed state,
had read him a passage from the Gospel of the Christians. It was the
passage in which the risen Lord asks Peter: “Lovest than me more than
these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He
said unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again the second time,
Simon, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that
I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the
third time, Lovest thou me? Peter was grieved that he said unto him the
third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest
all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed
my sheep.” And later on he said: “Follow me.”
He told how he had torn the book from his sister’s hand and had turned
its pages and had not desired to be led astray by it. But one sentence
had held his attention, and he had dwelt upon it. It was this: “And
he needed not to have knowledge of a man, for he knew what was in
man.” At that the hatred of Christ had vanished from his soul. Yet
he had not been able to believe in him or to turn to him. He didn’t
mean in the way of piety and prayer; he meant the idea which gave men
assurance and help to their minds. He had grasped that to-day, during
the soaring song, and as he watched the thousand eyes that seemed first
extinguished and then lit by a solemn flame. “Lovest thou me, Simon?”
He had grasped that utterly, and also the saying: “Follow me.” And
his consciousness of being a Jew and having been cast out had been
transformed from pain and shame into wealth and pride through the
assurance of a certain service and a peculiar power. “It was wonderful,
wonderful,” he assured her. “I don’t quite understand it yet. I am like
a lamp that has been lit.”
Johanna was frightened at the outburst of a passion so strange and
incomprehensible to her.
“Feed my sheep,” Michael almost sang the words out into the snow. “Feed
my sheep.”
“It is an awakening,” Johanna thought, with faint horror and envy. “He
has been awakened.”
The boy’s impassioned attachment to Christian became ever clearer to
her. When they waited at the locked door in Stolpische Street and
Christian came out with Niels Heinrich and passed the two without
noticing them, without glance or greeting, and went off with that
shaking, shuffling, distorted creature, Michael limped behind him for
a few paces, stared into the dark yard filled with the whirl of snow,
and then returned to Johanna and said beseechingly: “He mustn’t go with
that man. Do run after him and call him back. He mustn’t, for God’s
sake, go with him.”
Johanna, although she was herself perturbed, soothed the overwrought
boy. She remained for half an hour, forced herself to a natural
cheerfulness, chatted pleasantly as she made tea and laid the cloth for
a cold supper. Then she went home. At eight o’clock the next morning
Michael rang the bell at her dwelling. She had scarcely finished
dressing. She met him in the hall. He was pale, sleepless, struggling
for words. “Wahnschaffe hasn’t come home yet,” he murmured. “What shall
we do?”
Fighting down her first consternation, Johanna smiled. She took
Michael’s hand and said: “Don’t be afraid. Nothing will happen to him.”
“Are you so sure of that?”
“Quite sure!”
“Why are you?”
“I don’t know. But it would never occur to me to be afraid for him.
That would be a sheer waste of emotional energy.”
Her calm and assurance impressed Michael; yet he asked her to come
with him and stay with him if she could. After a moment’s reflection
she consented. On the way back they entered a bookshop and bought the
volumes that Lamprecht had suggested. Christian had given Michael money
for the purchase. He wanted to begin his studies alone and at once,
but he could not collect his thoughts. He sat at the table, turned the
leaves of books, arranged paper, lifted his head and listened, pressed
his hands together or jumped up and walked to and fro in the room,
looked out into the yard, gazed searchingly at Johanna, who was working
at a piece of embroidery and sat shivering and worn in a corner of the
sofa, gnawing at her lip with her small white teeth.
Thus that day passed and another night, and yet Christian did not
return. The impatience and anxiety of the boy became unrestrainable.
“We must bestir ourselves,” he said. “It is stupid to sit here and
wait.” Johanna, who was also beginning to grow anxious, prepared to go
either to Botho von Thüngen or to Dr. Voltolini. While she was putting
on her hat Lamprecht came in. When he had been told of the situation he
said: “You’re doing Wahnschaffe no favour by raising an alarm. If he
doesn’t come, it is for reasons of his own. Your fear is childish and
unworthy of him. We’d better start at something useful, my boy.”
His firmer intellect shared in an even higher degree Johanna’s
instinctive assurance. Michael submitted once more, and for two hours
he was an obedient pupil. Toward noon, when Johanna and Lamprecht had
left, a teamster presented himself with an unpaid bill. He said he
hadn’t received payment yet for the horses furnished for the funeral
of the late Fräulein Engelschall. Michael assured the man that he
would receive his money on the morrow, since Wahnschaffe had of course
merely forgotten the matter. The man grumbled and went out; but in
the yard he was joined by several other people, and Michael heard
the sound of hostile talk and of Christian’s name. He went into the
hall and to the outer door. The venomous words and references in the
vilest jargon drove the blood into his cheeks. He felt at once that
the feeling against Christian had been deliberately instigated by some
one. A red-haired fellow, a painter who lived on the fourth floor,
was especially scurrilous. He called the attention of the others to
Michael; a coarse remark was made; the crowd roared. When the courage
of his indignation drove Michael out into the yard, he was met by
menacing glances.
“What have you to say against Wahnschaffe?” he asked in a loud voice,
yet with an instinctive shrinking of his body.
Again they roared. Laughing, the red-haired fellow turned up his
sleeves. A woman at a window above reached into the room and poured a
pailful of dirty water into the yard. The water spattered Michael, and
there was thunderous laughter. The teamster Scholz put his hands to
his hips, and discoursed of idlers who set fleas into the ears of the
working-people with dam’ fool talk and hypocrisy. And suddenly other
words hissed into Michael’s face: “Get out o’ here, Jew!” He became
pale, and touched the wall behind him with his hands.
At that moment Botho von Thüngen and Johanna came in through the
doorway. They stopped and silently regarded the group of people in
the snow and also Michael. They understood. Johanna drew Michael into
the house. He gave a breathless report; he was so ardent, so nobly
indignant, that his features took on a kind of beauty.
After a while someone knocked at the door, and Amadeus Voss entered.
His courtesy was exaggerated, but he seemed in no wise astonished to
find Johanna here, nor did it seem to annoy him. He said he wanted to
talk to Christian Wahnschaffe. Thüngen replied that no one knew when
Christian would return or whether he would return on that day at all.
Voss said drily that he had time and could wait.
Johanna felt paralysed. She could not will to go away. All she wanted
to avoid was any demonstration, any scene. Like an animal that slinks
to a hiding-place, she cowered in the corner of the sofa, and gnawed
her lip with her little teeth.
Suddenly the thought flashed into her mind--“death, death, that’s the
only thing.”