Wearily and idly she talked into the pillow. “It’s the common, ordinary thing, always the same. Women that tell you something else are liars. Of course, a good many will invent long romances to seem interesting, but I can’t do that. What do I care about it? No, it’s always the same story, common and horrible and filthy from A to Z. Oh, yes, you might as well stay now and sit down. I’ll tell you what I can. If you’ve just got to know, I might as well tell you, but it’s hard. I don’t know where to begin. There is no beginning. There’s nothing definite,—no romance nor nothing.”
Christian sat down again. “When Adam Larsen died,” he said, “was there no path for you? Was there no one among his friends or relatives who paid any attention to you or helped you?”
She laughed a sarcastic laugh. “Hell! You’re all off there. His friends didn’t hardly know about me. His brother came to the funeral, but I didn’t dare so much as speak to him. He was one of the righteous kind, with a golden watch-chain and a tip of five sous for the servants. And I was in a strange country, and didn’t know the language, and had to see about getting away. I had thirty francs in cash, and the question was: where could I go? I tried to get work once or twice. But what sort of work was I to do? I hadn’t learned nothing. Was I to go as a servant, and black boots and scrub floors? No, thank you! I was used to something different now, and I thought I could get along somehow. Anyhow I didn’t give a damn what became of me; I didn’t matter so much. In Aachen I took a job as a waitress. Nice occupation! I can’t give you an idea of that—the tiredness in your legs, the abuse you got to take! For food they give you the scraps; the bed ain’t fit for a dog. What they expect of you makes you crazy mad.
“Well, when you live that way you’re open to all sorts of swindling talk. I went into a house; stayed there four months, and then went into another. I had debts, too. Suddenly you’re in debt, you can’t figure out why. Board and lodging and clothes—they charge you three times over for everything: you got to pay for the air you breathe. All you think of is how to get out, or something awful will happen. Well, then maybe some fellow comes along in high feather, throws money out of the windows, pays for you, and gets you out. You go with him, and on the third morning somebody knocks at the door. Who’s there? Police! Your man’s a thief, and you have the devil’s own time clearing yourself of complicity. What now? You have to have a roof and a bed, and some one to talk to; you want a warm bite and a cool drink. You’ve got the mark of the trade on you, and no one trusts you. You’re shoved and you’re pulled, and you go down and down, day by day, step by step. You hardly notice it, and suddenly you’re at the bottom.”
She curled herself up more compactly under the covers, and continued in a blunter tone. “It’s easy to say that—at the bottom; but really there’s no such thing. There’s a lower depth under every depth; and there ain’t no words to tell you how it is down there. No one can imagine it who hasn’t been there. No seeing from the outside and no knowing will make people realize it. You live in a place for which they charge you five times as much as is fair and decent. You’re common property, and everybody gets out of you all he can. You don’t care if the place is elegant or like a pigsty. It gives you the horrors to open the door of it. It ain’t yours; it’s everybody’s. It’s the place where everybody sort of sheds his filth, and you know them all and remember them all. It does you no good to go to bed and try to sleep. Another day is bound to come. There are the same greasy public houses and the same faces, always the same crowd. And then there’s the street—what you call your territory. That’s where you go by night. You know every window and crossing and lantern: you stare and turn and ogle and grin, and open your umbrella if it rains, and walk and stand around and keep a sharp eye on the police, and make up to any man if he’s got torn shoes or sports a fur ulster. And then you promise him God knows what; and all the time you’d like to scratch his heart out if he walks off, or spit in his face if he condescends to you. There it is! That’s the main thing. Pain and worry—Lord, all people have them. But what you get to find out about men there—oh, I tell you!”
Her last words were a cry again, a great cry, such as that other cry which Christian had not been able to forget. He sat very straight, and looked past the lamp to a certain spot on the wall.
Karen seemed, as she went on, to be addressing the floor. “Then there’s the lodging-house keeper, who steals and cheats. There’s the owner of the house, who acts by daylight as if he wanted to kick you, and comes slinking to your door at twilight. There’s the shop-keeper, who overcharges you, and acts as if he was doing you a favour by giving you rotten stuff for your good money. There’s the policeman that grudges you every step you take. If you don’t slip him a bribe, he pulls you in and you go to jail. There’s the innkeeper; maybe you owe him a bit. He torments you if you got no brass, and wheedles and flatters when you have a little. I don’t mention your own man; but you got to have one if you want to or not, otherwise you’ve got no protection. When he’s sent to the penitentiary, you got to get another. They’re all handy with their knives, but Mesecke was the worst of the lot. But I tell you what’s hell—hell like nothing else in the whole, wide world—that’s your business and your customers. It don’t matter if they’re elegant or common, young or old, skinflints or spendthrifts—when they get to you they’re no better than carrion on a dung-heap. There you see what hypocrisy is and rascality; there you see the dirty souls as they are, with their terror and their lies and their lusts. Everything comes out. It comes out, I tell you, because they ain’t ashamed to let it. They don’t have to be. You get to see human beings without shame, and what you see is the miserable, hideous flesh. Would you like to know how it is? Drink of a cess-pool and you’ll know! It don’t matter if it’s a man that beats his wife when she’s with child, or lets his children starve, or a student or an officer that’s gone to the dogs, or a frightened parson, or a merchant with a huge belly—it’s the same, the same—man without shame and the hideous flesh.”
She laughed with tormented scorn, and went on: “I met Mesecke when I was discharged from the hospital. I had no one then. Before that I’d been in jail three weeks on account of a scamp named Max. He was bad enough, but he was a sweet innocent compared to Mesecke. A young man happened to turn up in the café, a college student or something like that. He treated us to one bottle of champagne after another, day in and day out. You knew right away that there was something rotten about it. And he always wanted me, just me, and he made the money fly. So one day Mesecke took him aside, and said to him right out: ‘That money comes out of your father’s safe. You stole it.’ The boy owned right up, and his knees just shook. So Mesecke got his claws into him, and showed him how to get more. And he and a skunk named Woldemar promised to take him to an opium den that was, they told him, just like heaven on earth. That night, when the boy was with me, he began to cry and whine like everything. I felt sorry for him, ’cause I knew he’d come to a bad end; and I told him so, and told him straight and rough. Then he emptied his pockets, and I’d never seen that much money in my life; and it was all stolen money. I got kind of dizzy, and told him to take it and put it back; but he wanted me to have it and buy myself something for it. I trembled all over, and told him for God’s sake to take it home; but he cried and fell on his knees and hugged me, and suddenly Mesecke was in the room. He’d been hidden and heard everything, and I hadn’t had an idea. But the boy’s face turned as grey as a piece of pumice stone; he looked at me and at Mesecke, and of course he thought it was a plot. I was glad when Mesecke crashed his fist into my temple, so that the air seemed to be full of fire and blood, and then kicked me into a corner. That must have made the boy see I was innocent. Then Mesecke took hold of Adalbert—that was his name—and went off with him. Adalbert said nothing, and just followed. He didn’t turn up the next day nor the next nor the day after that, so I asked Mesecke: ‘What did you do to Adalbert?’ And he said: ‘I put him on board a ship that was going overseas.’ Yes, I thought to myself, that’s a likely story. So I asked him again; and this time he said if I didn’t hold my tongue he’d scatter my bones for me. Well, I kept still. Maybe Adalbert did take passage on a ship; it’s possible. We didn’t ever hear no more about him. And I didn’t care so much, for there was something else every day. I had to be careful of my own skin, and get through the night somehow, and through the day. And it was always the same, always the same.”
She sat up, and took hold of Christian’s arm with an iron grip. Her eyes sparkled, and she hissed out through clenched teeth: “But I didn’t really know it. When you’re in the thick of it you don’t know. You don’t feel that it’s no life for a human being; and you don’t want to see, and you don’t dare to know that you’re damned and in a burning hell! Why did you take me out of it? Why did things have to happen this way?”
Christian did not answer. He heard the air roar past his ears.