Yes, he lived there. Maybe the gentleman would like to look at the stinking hole? Right ahead then. He himself wouldn’t stay upstairs long. He just wanted to fix himself up a little more neatly and then go to Gottlieb’s Inn. That was a better class café with girlies and champagne. He was going to treat to fifteen or twenty bottles to-day. Why not—since he had the brass? But first he’d have to go to Grünbusch’s to pawn something. Maybe all that’d bore the gentleman; and maybe not, eh?
These words he snarled out in his rage on the dark stairs; but beneath his rage seethed a hell of terror.
The light of a street-lamp close by his window threw a pale, greenish light into the room, and saved Niels Heinrich the trouble of lighting a lamp. He pointed to it and remarked with a snicker that to have one’s lighting at public expense was pure gain. He could read his paper in bed and didn’t even have to blow out the lamp before going to bed. That showed you how a man had to live who wasn’t without brains and might have gotten ahead in the world. It was a lousy, stinking hole. But now things would change; he was going to move to the Hotel Adlon and have a room with a private bath, and buy his linen at the Nürnberger Bazaar.
He put his hand in his pocket, and a clinking could be heard. Christian took his words for incoherent babble and did not answer.
Niels Heinrich tore off his crumpled collar, and threw his coat and waistcoat on the bed. He opened a drawer and then a wardrobe, and with astonishing dexterity put on a clean collar, so tall that it seemed to enclose his neck in a white tube, tied a cravat of yellow silk, and slipped into a striped waistcoat and a morning coat. These things looked new, and contrasted absurdly with the stained, checked trousers which, for some reason, he did not change for others. The cuffs of his shirt were also soiled.
“Well, then why?” Suddenly he asked again, and his eyes flickered rabidly in the greenish light. “Why in hell do you stick to me like a leech?”
“I need you,” answered Christian, who had remained near the door.
“You need me? What for? Don’t understand. Talk plain, man, talk plain!”
“It serves no purpose to talk in that manner,” Christian said. “You misunderstand my being here and my ... how shall I put it?—my interest in you. No, not interest. That’s not the right word. But the word doesn’t matter. You probably think it was my purpose to have you surrender to the authorities and to repeat in court the confession you have made to me. But I assure you that that does not seem important to me or, rather, important only in so far as it is desirable for the sake of Joachim Heinzen, who is innocent and whom his position and inner confusion must make very wretched. He must be in a terrible state. I have felt that constantly, and felt the pain of it especially since your confession. I can almost see him. I have a vision of him trying to climb up the stony prison wall and wounding his hands and knees. He doesn’t understand; he doesn’t understand how a wall can be so steep and stony; he doesn’t understand what has happened to him. The world must seem sick to him at its core. You have evidently succeeded in hypnotizing him so effectively and lastingly, that under this terrible influence he has lost all control of his own actions. There is something in you that makes the exertion of such power quite credible. I am quite sure that your very name has faded from his memory. If some one went to him and whispered that name, Niels Heinrich Engelschall, into his ear, he would probably collapse as under a paralytic stroke. Of course, as I have thought it out, it is an exaggeration. But try to imagine him. One must try to grasp men and things imaginatively. Very few people do it; they cheat themselves. I see him as robbed of his very soul, as so poverty-stricken that the thought is scarcely bearable. You will reply: he is an idiot, irresponsible, with an undeveloped sensorium—more animal than human. Even science uses that argument; but it is a false argument. The premises are false and therefore the conclusion. My opinion is that all human beings have equally deep perceptions. There is no difference in sensitiveness to pain; there is only a difference in the consciousness of that sensitiveness. There is, one may say, no difference in the method of bookkeeping, only in the accounting.”