His passing out of the hall was blocked by a group of people at the entrance. Something was going to happen, and Bertram was forced to stay and see it. Nothing worth seeing, except as a study of human anatomy in acrobatic eccentricity.
A girl made her way through the little crowd to where a man dressed as a sailor waited for her. She wore a red cloak, but dropped it on the edge of the dirty floor, and took the sailor’s hand. For five minutes he whirled her about like a rag doll, flung her over his head, held her wrist and swung her from him, round and round, with frightful rapidity, hurled her backwards, and caught her before her head was smashed against the polished boards—a kind of Apache dance intensified in brutality. Several times the girl came down on her toes from a flying spin and smiled and kissed her hands to the groups of wine-drinkers who applauded and clinked their glasses together as a sign of approval. At the end the girl came to the edge of the dancing floor, picked up her red cloak, thrust her way through the group at the entrance, who said “Schön! Schön!” and then collapsed on to a wooden chair half concealed by a curtain in the passage. Bertram saw her face, which was dead white. She was sitting back with her neck over the rail of the chair, gasping like a dying creature.
Bertram spoke to a man in a kind of uniform like a commissionaire.
“Is she all right?”
“She will recover. She goes to another hall presently. She does that five times a night, and is well known in Berlin.”
“How much does she get for that?”
The man laughed in his throat.
“Enough to keep her alive. About as much as the price of a bottle of wine. Women are cheap.”
Bertram thought of some words spoken by the German girl who had kissed his hand.
“War is almost as cruel as peace.”