IX
Karen Engelschall said: “You don’t have to worry; there’s no chance of his getting back before night. If he does, I’ll tell him you’re an acquaintance of mine.”
She gave Girke a slow and watchful look. She sat by the window, resting her body with the broad satisfaction of those women of the people to whom sitting still is an achievement and a luxury. She was sewing a baby’s shift.
“Anyhow we don’t have much to talk about,” she continued with a malicious enjoyment. “You’ve said your say. They offer me sixty thousand if I go and disappear. That’s all right enough. But if I wait they’ll go a good bit higher. I’m somebody now. I’ll think it over; you can come back next week.”
“You should think very seriously,” Girke replied in his official manner. “Think of your future. This may be the highest offer. Six months ago you didn’t dream of such a thing. It’s very pleasant to live on one’s own income; it’s every one’s ideal. It is very foolish of you to lose such an opportunity.”
With her malicious smile she bent lower over her work. An undefined well-being made her press her knees together and close her eyes. Then she looked up, swept her tousled, yellow hair from her forehead, and said: “I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am to be taken in. D’you think I don’t know how rich he is? If he wanted to buy me off he’d make your offer look like dirt. Why shouldn’t I make a good bargain? No, I’m no fool. This here, as you say, is my great chance, but not the way you think. I’m going to wait and see. If I’m wrong, well, I done it to myself.”
Girke shifted his position uncomfortably. He looked at his watch, and then with his prying eyes regarded the room with its common wall-paper, furniture, and carpet.
“I can tell you one thing that’ll please you, and I don’t mind because it don’t change nothing,” Karen Engelschall said. “His people are all wrong if they think it’s on my account that he’s acting the way he does, and that he’d have stayed with them except for me. ’Course, I could make fools of you all and pretend he’d changed his life on my account. What good would that do? A new-born child could see that there’s something queer and crazy about it. So why should I go and play-act in front of you, when I myself just sit here and wonder and wonder!”
“That’s very true,” said Girke, amazed at her frankness. “I understand, and what you say interests me immensely. I have always said that we could count on the most valuable assistance from you. Now you would do me a very real service if you would answer a few questions. I should not, of course, forget your assistance but show my appreciation very practically.”
Karen giggled quietly. “I believe you,” she answered. “You’d like to spy around a bit and then go and report. No, I’m not fond of that sort o’ thing. There’re other places where you can hear a lot. There’re people what can tell you all you want to know. There’s that friend of his, that Voss: Go to him!” The name brought rage to her eyes. “He acts as if there wasn’t nothing he didn’t know in the world, and treats a person so mean and low that you’d like to punch his dirty nose for him. Ask him who gets the money. I don’t, but Voss ought to be able to tell you.”
“I’m afraid you overestimate that,” said Girke, with his most expert air. “There is no doubt that the man in question is at the bottom of all the trouble. But things being as they are, even ten times the amount that satisfies his greed would be inconsiderable. I can give you that very definite assurance. There must be other and quite unaccounted drains on his purse.”
“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying there,” Karen answered, and showed her small, yellow, evil teeth. “Maybe you’d like to search my wardrobe or my mattress here, eh? Maybe you think this place is too fine or that I got expensive clothes and jewels? And did you ever see that hole over at Gisevius’s where the elegant gentleman himself sleeps? We’re living in luxury, we are! Why, the very mice starve here. I found one dead in a corner over there the other day. Most people hate mice, but they don’t bother him. And it’s pitiful for a man that’s lived like he has. According to what people say, he must have been just like the emperor. He had castles and game-preserves and motor cars and the handsomest women, and they just threw themselves at his head. And never no trouble and no worry, more of everything than he could use, and money and clothes and eating and drinking and friends and servants and everything. And now he’s at Gisevius’s, where the mice die of hunger.”
Her burning eyes were fixed on Girke, but in reality she saw him no longer. She was no longer speaking to this unknown man, whose professional curiosity left her quite unmoved. She was relieving herself by breaking the convulsive silence of her lonely days. Her hands lay on her lap like empty shells, and the child’s garment had slipped to the floor. Her tongue was unleashed. The words poured forth—words born of her brooding, words familiar to her through many days and nights of strangeness and amazement. In her voice there was something metallic, and in her face the slack muscles grew taut.
Girke listened tensely and took mental notes. He noticed that he need ask no questions now. The machine, fed by a secret fire, had started itself.
Karen went on: “He comes here and sits down and looks around. He sits down and opens a book and studies. Then he puts the book away and looks around again. Then he notices me sudden like, as if I’d just been blown in. If only he don’t begin asking questions again, I says to myself. Then I say to him: ‘There was a big noise in the street to-day.’ Or I say: ‘Isolde’s hands are swollen; we got to have some ointment. My mother was here,’ I says maybe, ‘and told me of a place on Alexander Square where you can buy linen cheap.’ He just nods. Then I put on the water for the coffee, and he tells me how a mangy dog followed him for a long time and how he fed it, and that he’d been to a workingmen’s meeting in Moabit and had talked to some people. But he don’t tell me much, and acts kind of ashamed. I’m satisfied so long as he don’t ask questions. But his eyes get that expression in ’em, and then he asks if my time wasn’t coming soon,”—brutally she pointed to her distended body—“and if I wasn’t glad, and how it was the other times, and if I was glad then, and if I’d like to have this or that. And he brings me apples and cake and chocolate and a shawl and a fur-piece for my neck. ‘Look, Karen,’ he says, ‘what I’ve brought you,’ and he kisses my hand. Kisses my hand, I tell you, ’sif I was God knows what, and he didn’t know about me. Did you ever hear of anybody kissing the hand of a woman like me?”
She was pale as she asked the question; her features were distorted, and the helmet of her yellow hair seemed to rise. Girke’s eyes became blank and stony. “Very remarkable,” he murmured; “most interesting.”
Karen paid no attention to him. “‘How are you, Karen?’” she mocked Christian’s voice. “‘Do you want for anything?’ What should I be wanting? So I get desperate and I says: ‘A runner for the floor or cretonne curtains for the bedroom. Red cretonne,’ I says, ‘because it pops into my mind. Sometimes we go out together to Humboldthain or the Oranienburger Gate. He thinks to himself and smiles and says nothing. The people stare and I get a goose-flesh. I’d like to scream out at ’em: ‘Yes, there he is, the great man, that’s him walking with me. And this is me—a woman of the streets that’s going to have a baby. A fine couple, eh? Mighty fine! We’re a grand couple, we are!’ Sometimes that Voss comes and they talk in the other room; or anyhow Voss talks. He knows how to, too; better’n any preacher. And once there was a baron here, a young blond fellow. That was a funny business. He took to crying, and cried and cried like a child. Christian said nothing, but just sat down by him. You never know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he walks up and down the room, and other times he’ll stand and look out of the window. I don’t know where he goes, and I don’t know where he comes from. Mother says I’m a fool. She says she’s going to find out what’s what. If she smells money she sticks like a burr. Only I wish she hadn’t sicked Niels Heinrich on to me. He gets more shameless all the time. I get scared when I hear him on the stairs. He begins to cut up rough in the hall. Last Monday he was here and wanted money. ‘I got none,’ I says, ‘you go to work.’ He’s learned bricklaying and can earn good money, but doing nothing suits him better. He told me to shut my trap or he’d lay me out. Just then Christian came in. Niels Heinrich glares at him. My legs was shaking, and I draws Christian aside and says: ‘He wants brass.’ Christian didn’t know what I meant. So I says: ‘Money.’ And he gave him money, gave him a cool hundred, and turned and went out. Niels Heinrich followed him; I thought there’d be a fight. Nothing happened; but it was a nasty business. I can’t get the scare out of my bones.”
She stopped and panted for breath.
Girke thought it his duty to interpolate: “We have accumulated sufficient evidence to prove that Niels Heinrich pursues him with demands for money.”
Karen scarcely listened. Her face grew darker and darker. She put her hands against her breast, arose clumsily, and looked around in the room. Her feet were turned inward and her abdomen protruded. “He comes and he goes, he comes and he goes,” she complained, in a voice that gradually became almost a scream. “That’s the way it is, day out and day in. If only he wouldn’t ask questions. It makes me feel hot and cold. It’s like being searched by a matron. D’you know how that is? Everything’s turned inside out and everything’s handled. Awful! And I ought to try to be comfortable here; there’s nothing better in the world. When you’ve been kicked around like some stinking animal, you ought to thank God to have a chance to breathe easy. But to sit and wait and tell how things was at this place and at that, and how this thing happened and the other—no, I can’t stand it no more! It’s too much! It’s like splitting a person’s head open!” She struck her fist against her temple. She seemed an animal, an animal with all the ugliness of a human soul dead or distorted, a wicked savage awakened now and untamable.
Girke was confounded. He got up, and pushed the chair, both as a protection and a weapon, between the woman and himself. He said: “I won’t take up more of your time. I beg you to consider my proposition carefully. I shall drop in again some time.” He went with a sensation as of danger at his back.
Karen hardly observed that she was alone in the room. She brooded. Her thinking processes were primitive. Two uncertainties tormented her to the point of morbidness and rage: What impelled Christian to search her soul and past, again and again, with the same patience, kindliness, and curiosity? And what inexplicable force made her answer, explain, relate, and give an accounting of her life?
Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet some one else. It seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each day’s disconsolate end.
Forgotten things and places plagued her and emerged terribly from her consciousness: rooms and beds and walls, cities and streets and street-corners and public houses and dark halls that led to police courts; human beings and words, and certain hours and days and tears and cries; and all terrors and degradations and crimes, all mockery and wild laughter—all this came back to her, and the past arose and lacerated her mind.
It was like being in an inconceivably long shaft through which one had already passed. And now one was commanded to retrace one’s steps and fetch something that one had forgotten. One resisted desperately and struggled against the command, but in vain. One had to turn back to search for that forgotten thing without knowing what it was. And as one wandered along, a figure met one from the opposite direction, and that other figure was one’s very self. One was inclined to believe in a mirror and its image. But that other self was lacerated; its breast was torn open, and within it one saw the crimson gleaming of a naked heart.
What was it? What did it all mean?
She fell back on the chair with a deep moan, and covered her face with her hands. Oh, he should be made to pay dearly for it—that tormentor of hers.
The darkness crept in and blotted out her form.