Daniel did not sense her hatred. As he looked into her face, marked with a life of transgression and already claimed by fate, he built up in his own soul a picture of inimitable chastity. He tried to see the playmate of a god. The curtain decorated with the distorted face of a harlequin, the acrobat and the dog trainer at the adjacent table, who were quarrelling over their money, the four half-grown gamblers directly behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and incessantly on perpetual motion—to all of this he paid not the slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in the bottom of the sea. He got up and left.
But as he saw the snow-covered streets before him and was unable to decide whether he should go home or not, Zingarella stepped up to him. “Come, be quick, before they see that we are together,” she whispered. And thus they walked along like two fugitives, whose information concerning each other stops short with the certainty that both are poor and wretched and are making their way through a snow storm.
“What is your name?” asked Daniel.
“My name is Anna Siebert.”
The clock in the St. Lorenz Church struck three. The one up in the tower of St. Sebaldus corroborated this reckoning by also striking three and in much deeper tones.
They came to an old house, and after floundering through a long, dark, ill-smelling passage way, entered a room in the basement. Anna Siebert lighted a lamp that had a red chimney. Gaudy garments of the soubrette hung on the wall. A big, grey cat lay on the table cover and purred. Anna Siebert took the cat in her arms and caressed it. Its name was Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.
Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella, standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the public was no longer satisfied with her work.
“Is this what you call the public?” asked Daniel, who never once took his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on the desolate distances of the mirror. “These fathers of families who side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame—this is what you call the public?”
“Well, however that may be,” Anna Siebert continued in a colourless voice, “the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can’t expect a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a year ago in Zürich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he doesn’t need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you’ve got to live, haven’t you, Zephyr,” said Anna as she picked up the cat, pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, “You’ve got to live.”
She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel, fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. “I have reached the end,” she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, “I am at the end of all things.”