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.