“I can’t tell you the reason. But where Karen is concerned, nature pursues a quite logical method.”
“Perhaps you are right,” Ruth answered. “But that sounds as though you had little confidence in science. Am I right? Why, then, are you studying medicine?”
“It’s the merest accident. Some one happened to call my attention to it as one of a hundred possible doors into the open. It seemed to me that it might lead to a very early usefulness. It offers a definite aim, and it is concerned with people—with human beings!” More pertinent reasons that stirred within him, and that he might have given her, were not yet ripe for speech, so he clung to a banality.
“Yes, people,” said Ruth, and looked at him searchingly. After a while she added: “You must know a great deal; there must be a great deal in you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She was the first human being in whose presence he felt wholly free of the compulsion to feign and to guard himself. In her there was a pure element that was frank and enthusiastic, that lived and vibrated with the souls of others. Her instincts had freedom and sureness, and her whole inner life radiated an irresistible intensity. The very stones gave up their souls to her. She was the seeing friend of inanimate things. She forgot neither words nor images, and her impatience to communicate what she had felt and the courage she had to acknowledge and follow her own heart surrounded her with an atmosphere as definite as the strong, sanative fragrance of plants in spring.
Life and its law seemed simple to her. The stars ruled one’s fate; that fate expressed itself through the passions of our blood; the mind formed, illuminated, cleansed the process.
She told Christian about her father.
David Hofmann was a typical Jew of the lower middle-classes from the eastern part of the country. He had been a merchant, but his business had failed, and he had left home to begin life over again. By indomitable toil he had saved up a few thousand marks; but a sharper had done him out of his savings, and in poverty and debt he had renewed the struggle for a third time. His industry was tireless, his patience magnificent. From Breslau he had moved to Posen, from Posen to Stettin, thence to Lodz, and from Lodz to Königsberg. All winter he had tramped the country roads from village to village and from manor-house to manor-house. He had seen his wife and his youngest child sicken and die, and had finally set his last hope on the life and opportunities of the metropolis. Eighteen months ago he had come to Berlin with Ruth and Michael, and here too he was on his feet day and night. With mind exhausted and enfeebled body, he still dreamed of some reward and success to ease his approaching latter years. But failure was his portion, and in hours of reflection he would yield to despair.