XXIII
David Hofmann had written a last message of farewell to his children from Bremerhaven. The postman had stuck the card halfway under the door, and Christian read it.
So Ruth could not be with her father. Here was a certainty that terrified him. Where was she then? And where was Michael?
He informed the house agent of the disappearance of the two, and the police were notified.
Christian knew the names of some of the families where she had given lessons. He visited these people, but no one could give him a hint. He went to the institutions that she had attended and to friends with whom she had associated. Everywhere there was the same surprise and helplessness. He was sent on wild errands and to other people. Some one would think he or she had last seen Ruth at such a place. The track was always lost. He would follow chance traces from morning until night, but they always faded from sight. In his anxiety and his anxious inquiries he finally found himself going in a futile circle.
He had entrusted Isolde Schirmacher and the widow Spindler with the care of Karen.
At the end of the fifth day he came home wearily. Botho Thüngen and the student Lamprecht had helped him in his search. It had all been in vain. If a faint hope arose, it was extinguished the next moment.
And where was Michael?
Christian climbed the stairs. The gas jet in the hall hissed. Near the balustrade cowered the white kitten and mewed. Christian bent over and gathered it up in his hands. It began to purr with infinite content, and snuggled against his coat. He stroked the silken fur, and a sense of the animal’s well-being passed into his nerves.
By agreement with the agent he had taken the key of the Hofmann flat into his keeping. He was to deliver it up next morning to a police detective who would come to investigate.
He unlocked the door and entered the dark room. The air was stuffy. Every breath of Ruth’s presence had faded. Ruth, little Ruth! As his emotion gathered in him, the darkness ceased to be unnatural and disturbing.
He sat down beside the table. The dim light that came in from the hall fell on the books and papers of his little friend. He got up and closed the door. Only now was he able to summon up the image of Ruth as vividly as he had been able to do during the first night after her disappearance. Not only did she emerge from the darkness as she had done then; she even spoke to him.
She fixed on him her exquisitely laughing eyes, and in a tone whose seriousness belied that expression utterly, she said: “No, never, nevermore.”
What did the words mean? What was their significance?
The fog gathered more thickly against the window panes. The kitten snuggled deeper into his arms. Its white fur shimmered indistinctly in the darkness. This breathing, living creature, warm and affectionate, prevented him from yielding to a grief that threatened to drag him into unknown depths.
Suddenly he had a vision. A landscape appeared before him. There was a path bordered by tall poplars in autumnal foliage, a path of mud, of black morass. On either side of it the heath stretched to infinity. There were the black, triangular silhouettes of a few huts, with windows red from the hearth-fires within. Here and there were puddles of dirty, yellow water, which reflected the grey sky and in which tree-trunks rotted. Over the whole scene was a whitish twilight, and in the distance emerged the rude form of a shepherd; and in that distance was a mass of egg-shaped bodies, half of wool, half of slime, that jostled one another. It was the herd of sheep. With gloom and difficulty they crept along the muddy path to a farmstead—a few mossy roofs of straw and turf amid the poplars. There was the dark sheepfold. Its open door showed a cavernous blackness; but through chinks in the back wall of the sheepfold flickered faint glints of the twilight. The caravan of wool and slime disappeared in the cavern. The shepherd and a woman with a lantern closed the door.
How was it that the invisible-visible presence of Ruth evoked this landscape in his soul? He had never, so far as he knew, seen such a landscape. How did it happen that this landscape exhaled something calming and shattering at once, yearning and fear—that it had power over him as scarcely any human fate or form or face? And how did it come to pass that Ruth’s “no, never, nevermore,” seemed the mysterious meaning of this landscape, the symbol of this vision?
Ruth, little Ruth!
Grief and sadness entered into Christian’s very marrow.