She waited: her summons remained unanswered. She knocked again. The same hollow sound reverberated through the building, and her heart began to sink and die within her.
A young girl now came up, stopped at the door, and knocked. She was bound upon the same errand as Lotte, save that a fortnight’s work was due to her. She had scrambled and starved over the past week, she scarcely knew how. Wan and weak, but full of hope, she was here for the miserable sum for which she had bartered health, exhausted her strength, and perilled her young life.
There was no answer to her knock at the door, save the same hollow mocking echo, as before.
Another girl made her appearance; a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth; all here upon one errand—to claim the scanty sum for which they had worked, almost from dawn to dawn. They spoke to each other, questioningly: they looked into each other’s eyes with dread apprehension, and they conversed in low excited tones. The wages they had come to receive had been earned with a death-sweat. It was to them of vital consequence.
One or two had homes and parents upon whom to fall back for assistance; but the loss of the money to the others left them only a choice between the streets and the river.
Lotte grasped at a railing near her for support. A throng of sharp ringing sounds rushed through her brain. She took no part in the conversation. She could not have uttered a sound, her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth, her throat swelled and contracted as though it would stifle her.
She began to lose her perception of what was going on around her. Everything seemed to be absorbed in a harrowing consciousness that her beggary, her loneliness, and desolation had assumed proportions of more terrible magnitude than they had ever yet done—that they surpassed her power to endure them longer.
She had a dim impression that a person residing next door told them all that their employer had fled with his goods ere daybreak, no one knew whither.
Sickened, heart-broken, Lotte quitted her hold of the railing which had sustained her, and staggered away.
It was not difficult to find her way to the black and murky river, careering swiftly and noiselessly through the heart of the vast metropolis down to the sea.