XX
In the course of their talk Christian and Crammon had wandered farther and farther into the tangled alleys around the harbour. “Let us turn back and seek a way out,” Crammon suggested. “It isn’t very nice here. A damnable neighbourhood, in fact.”
He peered about, and Christian too looked around. When they had gone a few steps farther, they came upon a man lying flat on his belly on the pavement. He struggled convulsively, croaked obscene curses, and shook his fist threateningly toward a red-curtained, brightly lit door.
Suddenly the door opened, and a second man flew out. A paper box, an umbrella, and a derby hat were pitched out after him. He stumbled down the steps with outstretched arms, fell beside the first man, and remained sitting there with heavy eyes.
Christian and Crammon looked in through the open door. In the smoky light twenty or thirty people were crouching. The monotonous crying of a woman became audible. At times it became shriller.
The glass door was flung shut.
“I shall see what goes on in there,” said Christian, and mounted the steps to the door. Crammon had only time to utter a horrified warning. But he followed. The reek of cheap whiskey struck him as he entered the room behind Christian.
Beside tables and on the floor crouched men and women. In every corner lay people, sleeping or drunk. The eyes which were turned toward the newcomers were glassy. The faces here looked like lumps of earth. The room, with its dirty tables, glasses, and bottles had a colour-scheme of scarlet and yellow. Two sturdy fellows stood behind the bar.
The woman whose crying had penetrated to the street sat on a bench beside the wall. Blood was streaming down her face, and she continued to utter her monotonous and almost bestial whine. In front of her, trying hard to keep erect on legs stretched far apart, stood the huge fellow whom Christian had observed at the public funeral of the murdered harlot. In a hoarse voice, in the extreme jargon of the Berlin populace, he was shouting: “Yuh gonna git what’s comin’ to yuh! I’ll show yuh what’s what! I’ll blow off yer dam’ head-piece’n yuh cin go fetch it in the moon!”
On the threshold of an open door in the rear stood a stout man with innumerable watch-charms dangling across his checked waistcoat. A fat cigar was held between his yellow teeth. He regarded the scene with a superior calm. It was the proprietor of the place. When he saw the two strangers his brows went up. He first took them to be detectives, and hastened to meet them. Then he saw his mistake and was the more amazed. “Come into my office, gentlemen,” he said in a greasy voice, and without removing the cigar. “Come back there, and I’ll give you a drink of something good.” He drew Christian along by the arm. A woman with a yellow head-kerchief arose from the floor, stretched out her arms toward Christian, and begged for ten pfennigs. Christian drew back as from a worm.
An old man tried to prevent the gigantic lout from maltreating the bleeding woman any more. He called him Mesecke and fawned upon him. But Mesecke gave him a blow under the chin that sent him spinning and moaning. Murmurs of protest sounded, but no one dared to offend the giant. The proprietor whispered to Christian: “What he wants is brass; wants her to go on the street again and earn a little. Nothing to be done right now.”
He grasped Crammon by the sleeve too, and drew them both through the door into a dark hall. “I suppose you gentlemen are interested in my establishment?” he asked anxiously. He opened a door and forced them to enter. The room into which they came showed a tasteless attempt at such luxury as is represented by red plush and gilt frames. The place was small, and the furniture stood huddled together. Crossed swords hung above a bunch of peacock feathers, and above the swords the gay cap of a student fraternity. Between two windows stood a slanting desk covered with ledgers. An emaciated man with a yellowish face sat at the desk and made entries in a book. He quivered when the proprietor entered the room, and bent more zealously over his work.
The proprietor said: “I’ve got to take care of you gents or something might happen. When that son of a gun is quiet you can go back and look the place over. I guess you’re strangers here, eh?” From a shelf he took down a bottle. “Brandy,” he whispered. “Prime stuff. You must try it. I sell it by the bottle and by the case. A number one! Here you are!” Crammon regarded Christian, whose face was without any sign of disquiet. With a sombre expression he went to the table and, as though unseeing, touched his lips to the glass which the proprietor had filled. It was a momentary refuge, at all events.
In the meantime a frightful noise penetrated from the outer room. “Fighting again,” said the proprietor, listened for a moment, and then disappeared. The noise increased furiously for a moment. Then silence fell. The book-keeper, without raising his waxy face, said: “Nobody can stand that. It’s that way every night. And the books here show the profits. That man Hillebohm is a millionaire, and he rakes in more and more money without mercy, without compassion. Nobody can stand that.”
The words sounded like those of a madman.
“Are we going to permit ourselves to be locked up here?” Crammon asked indignantly. “It’s rank impudence.”
Christian opened the door, and Crammon drew from his back pocket the Browning revolver that was his constant companion. They passed through the hall and stopped on the threshold of the outer room. Mesecke had vanished. Many arms had finally expelled him. The woman from whom he had been trying to get money was washing the blood from her face. The old man who had been beaten when he had pleaded for her said consolingly: “Don’t yuh howl, Karen. Things’ll get better. Keep up, says I!” The woman hardly listened. She looked treacherous and angry.
A tangle of yellow hair flamed on her head, high as a helmet and unkempt. While she was bleeding she had wiped the blood with her naked hand, and then stained her hair with it.
“You go home now,” the proprietor commanded. “Wash your paws and give our regards to God if you see him. Hurry up, or your sweetheart’ll be back and give you a little more.”
She did not move. “Well, how about it, Karen,” a woman shrilled. “Hurry. D’yuh want some more beating?”
But the woman did not stir. She breathed heavily, and suddenly looked at Christian.
“Come with us,” Christian said unexpectedly. The bar-tenders roared with laughter. Crammon laid a hand of desperate warning on Christian’s shoulder.
“Come with us,” Christian repeated calmly. “We will take you home.”
A dozen glassy eyes stared their mockery. A voice brayed: “Hell, hell, but you’re gettin’ somethin’ elegant.” Another hummed as though scanning verses: “If that don’t kill the bedbugs dead, I dunno what’ll do instead! Don’t yuh be scared, Karen. Hurry! Use your legs!”
Karen got up. She had not taken her shy and sombre eyes from Christian. His beauty overwhelmed her. A crooked, frightened, cynical smile glided over her full lips.
She was rather tall. She had fine shoulders and a well-developed bosom. She was with child—perhaps five months; it was obvious when she stood. She wore a dark green dress with iridescent buttons, and at her neck a flaming red riband fastened by a brooch that represented in silver, set with garnets, a Venetian gondola, and bore the inscription: Ricordo di Venezia. Her shoes were clumsy and muddy. Her hat—made of imitation kid and trimmed with cherries of rubber—lay beside her on the bench. She grasped it with a strange ferocity.
Christian looked at the riband and at the silver brooch with its inscription: Ricordo di Venezia.
Crammon sought to protect their backs. For new guests were coming in—fellows with dangerous faces. He had simply yielded to the inevitable and incomprehensible, and determined to give a good account of himself. He gritted his teeth over the absence of proper police protection, and said to himself: “We won’t get out of this hole alive, old boy.” And he thought of his comfortable hotel-bed, his delicious, fragrant bath, his excellent breakfast, and of the box of chocolates on his table. He thought of young girls who exhaled the fresh sweetness of linen, of all pleasant fragrances, of Ariel’s smile and Rumpelstilzkin’s gaiety, and of the express train that was to have taken him to Vienna. He thought of all these things as though his last hour had come.
Two sailors came in dragging between them a girl who was pale and stiff with drunkenness. Roughly they threw her on the floor. The creature moaned, and had an expression of ghastly voluptuousness, of strange lasciviousness on her face. She lay there stiff as a board. The sailors, with a challenge in their voices, asked after Mesecke. He had evidently met them and complained to them. They wanted to get even with the proprietor. One of them had a scarlet scratch across his forehead; the other’s arms were naked up to his shoulders and tattooed until they were blue all over. The tattooing represented a snake, a winged wheel, an anchor, a skull, a phallus, a scale, a fish, and many other objects.
Both sailors measured Christian and Crammon with impudent glances. The one with the tattooed arms pointed to the revolver in Crammon’s hand, and said: “If you don’t put up that there pistol I’ll make you, by God!”
The other went up to Christian and stood so close to him that he turned pale. Vulgarity had never yet touched him, nor had the obscene things of the gutter splashed his garments. Contempt and disgust arose hotly in him. These might force him to abandon his new road; for they were more terrible than the vision of evil he had had in the house of Szilaghin.
But when he looked into the man’s eyes, he became aware of the fact that the latter could not endure his glance. Those eyes twitched and flickered and fled. And this perception gave Christian courage and a feeling of inner power, the full effectiveness of which was still uncertain.
“Quiet there!” the proprietor roared at the two sailors. “I want order. You want to get the police here, do you? That’d be fine for us all, eh? You’re a bit crazy, eh? The girl can go with the gentlemen, if they’ll pay her score. Two glasses champagne—that’s one mark fifty. And that ends it.”
Crammon laid a two-mark piece on the table. Karen Engelschall had put on her hat, and turned toward the door. Christian and Crammon followed her, and the proprietor followed them with sarcastic courtesy, while the two sturdy bar-tenders formed an additional bodyguard. A few half-drunken men sent the strains of a jeering song behind them.
The street was empty. Karen gazed up and down it, and seemed uncertain in which direction she should go. Crammon asked her where she lived. She answered harshly that she didn’t want to go home. “Then where shall we take you?” Crammon asked, forcing himself to be patient and considerate. She shrugged her shoulders. “It don’t matter,” she said. Then, after a while, she added defiantly. “I don’t need you.”
They went toward the harbour, Karen between the two men. For a moment she stopped and murmured with a shudder of fear: “But I mustn’t run into him. No, I mustn’t.”
“Will you suggest something then?” Crammon said to her. His impulse was simply to decamp, but for Christian’s sake, and in the hope of saving him uninjured from this mesh of adventures, he played the part of interest and compassion.
Karen Engelschall did not answer, but hurried more swiftly as she caught sight of a figure in the light of a street lamp. Until she was beyond its vision she gasped with terror.
“Shall we give you money?” Crammon asked again.
She answered furiously: “I don’t need your money. I want no money.” Surreptitiously she gazed at Christian, and her face grew malicious and stubborn.
Crammon went over beside Christian, and spoke to him in French. “The best thing would be to take her to an inn where she can get a room and a bed. We can deposit a sum of money there, so that she is sheltered for a while. Then she can help herself.”
“Quite right. That will be best,” Christian replied. And, as though he could not bear to address her, he added: “Tell her that.”
Karen stopped. She lifted her shoulders as though she were cold, and said in a hoarse voice: “Leave me alone. What are you two talking about? I won’t walk another step. I’m tired. Don’t pay no attention to me!” She leaned against the wall of a house, and her hat was pushed forward over her forehead. She was as sorry and dissipated a looking object as one could possibly imagine.
“Isn’t that the sign of an inn?” Crammon asked and pointed to an illuminated sign at the far end of the street.
Christian, who had very keen eyes, looked and answered: “Yes. It says ‘King of Greece.’ Do go and inquire.”
“A lovely neighbourhood and a lovely errand,” Crammon said plaintively. “I am paying for my sins.” But he went.
Christian remained with the woman, who looked down silently and angrily. Her fingers scratched at her riband. Christian listened to the beating of the tower-clock. It struck two. At last Crammon reappeared. He beckoned from a distance and cried: “Ready.”
Christian addressed the girl for the first time. “We’ve found a shelter for you,” he said, a little throatily, and, quite contrary to his wont, blinked his eyes. His own voice sounded disagreeably in his ears. “You can stay there for some days.”
She looked at him with eyes that glowed with hatred. An indescribable but evil curiosity burned in her glance. Then she lowered her eyes again. Christian was forced to speak again: “I think you will be safe from that man there. Try to rest. Perhaps you are ill. We could summon a physician.”
She laughed a soft, sarcastic laugh. Her breath smelt of whiskey.
Crammon called out again.
“Come on then,” Christian said, mastering his aversion with difficulty.
His voice and his words made the same overwhelming impression on her that his appearance had done. She started to go as though she were being propelled from behind.
A sleepy porter in slippers stood at the door of the inn. His servile courtesy proved that Crammon had known how to treat him. “Number 14 on the second floor is vacant,” he said.
“Send some one to your lodgings to-morrow for your things,” Crammon advised the girl.
She did not seem to hear him. Without a word of thanks or greeting she followed the porter up the soiled red carpet of the stairs. The rubber cherries tapped audibly against the brim of her hat. Her clumsy form disappeared in the blackness.
Crammon breathed a sigh of relief. “My kingdom for a four-wheeler,” he moaned. At a nearby corner they found a cab.